


o V 
















<G >3> 











% 

^y »lvi% 


























afc. ° v 



j> 











-so* 



V : °" " ^ v 



V. 



^ ■ 









V 







French Colonists and Exiles 
in the United States 



French Colonists and Exiles 
in the United States 



BY 



J. G. Rosengarten 

Author of " The German Soldier in the Wars of the 
United States," etc. 




Philadelphia & London 

J. B. Lippincott Company 

1907 



• ■i(Y«? CONGRESS j 
lwo C'-oies Recelvod 
26 190/ 



r-c 



^prvrteht Entry 

■ Oc-t ^ '967 

CLASS A xxc., No, 
COPY B. 



Copyright, 1907, by 
J. B. Lippincott Company 



Published September, 1907 



Printed by J. B. Lippincott Company 
The Washington Bquare Press, Philadelphia, U. S. A. 



Contents 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Early French Settlements in the 

United States 13 

II. French Colonies in Louisiana 35 

III. The Huguenot Settlers 52 

IV. French Soldiers in the United States. . 64 
V. Early French Travellers in the United 

States 78 

VI. French Exiles in the United States. ... 80 
VII. French Settlers and Exiles in South 

Carolina 91 

VIII. French Settlements in the West and in 

Canada 97 

IX. Brillat Savarin in the United States . . 103 
X. French Land Companies in the United t 

States 106 

XL French Plan op Education in the United 

States 121 

XII. French Colonies in the United States: 

Gallipolis, Ohio; Asylum, Penna 125 

XIII. French Settlement in Iowa 151 

XIV. Bonap artist Exiles 159 

XV. Royalist Exiles 176 

XVI. Balzac's Story op a French Exile 183 

XVII. French Members op the American Philo- 
sophical Society 186 

Appendix A 211 

Appendix B 220 

Index 225 



Introduction 



The French settlers in the United States 
have not received the attention due to them. 
Parkman and Bancroft and Roosevelt have 
dwelt upon the early history of the French in 
this country, and Fortier has given us an ad- 
mirable work on the history of Louisiana. 
Many French authors and travellers have writ- 
ten about the United States, but little attention 
has been paid to the colonies settled with more 
or less success in the closing years of the Eigh- 
teenth and the beginning of the Nineteenth 
Centuries. Some accounts are found in local 
publications, those of state historical societies 
or in the pamphlets written by local authors, 
but these are not easily accessible. M. Anatole 
Le Braz, well known for his books on Brittany, 
suggested that a collected story be given of 
the efforts to establish French colonies in the 
United States. To do this I have made notes 
from the recognized historians, and from such 
7 



INTRODUCTION 

local publications as could best serve to supply 
information on the subject. There are some 
references in the writings of travellers, and 
especially of those of the numerous French 
exiles who at the time of the French Revolu- 
tion, and after the fall of Napoleon, visited 
this country. These I have noted, too, as help- 
ing to give an account of the French colonies 
in the United States, as they saw them. 

Philadelphia, as the political and social 
capital, attracted these exiles, and many of 
them made it their home. Some of them were 
men of letters and of science, and were elected 
members of the American Philosophical 
Society, which thus had a close connection with 
the most noted of the French settlers and col- 
onists, while many distinguished French trav- 
ellers were welcomed at its meetings, elected 
members, and interested in its work. A brief 
summary from its records will show how long 
this connection lasted. Nearly all the early, 
and many of the later French diplomatic rep- 
resentatives in this country were elected mem- 
bers, and the present distinguished French 
Ambassador, M. Jusserand, well known by his 



INTRODUCTION 

scholarly writings on English Literature 
and its history, has received this acknowledg- 
ment, as well as due honors from many Amer- 
ican universities. 

The Huguenot settlers in the United States 
have received exhaustive treatment in Baird's 
History of the Huguenots, but even his indus- 
try did not follow them in all their settlements, 
in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Many later 
French settlers have been absorbed into their 
older neighbors ; even names have been changed, 
so as to make it difficult to recognize the orig- 
inal French patronymics. Of the compara- 
tively recent French Socialist colonies in the 
West little is known. It is hardly feasible to 
say why the French colonies have never suc- 
ceeded, while other settlers, Welsh, German, 
Scotch, Irish, and in later times, Scandinavians, 
Dutch and Italians, have persevered and be- 
come noteworthy factors in that great amal- 
gam, the American people. Of the individual 
French settlers many have achieved success, 
and their names are known through the work 
of their descendants, in art and science, in lit- 
erature, in learned professions, — indeed, in 
9 



INTRODUCTION 

every walk of life our citizens of French birth 
and descent have proved a valuable addition. 
Of those less fortunate early French colonists, 
it is plain that their failure was largely due 
to American greed in land schemes. 

Senator Lodge's Century (September, 1891) 
article on " The Distribution of Ability in the 
United States," reprinted in his " Historical 
and Political Essays " (Boston, 1892), gives 
a very high standard to the French, including 
the Huguenot Protestant French who came here 
during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Cen- 
turies, either direct from France, or by way of 
England and Holland, and the French descend- 
ants of the original settlers in Louisiana, Mis- 
souri, and Illinois, of soldiers who came with 
Rochambeau, or refugees who fled here from 
France and from St. Domingo in 1792. 
He gives in his Division of Races, based 
on Appleton's Encyclopedia of American 
Biography, Huguenot 589, French 85, among 
statesmen, soldiers, clergy, lawyers, physi- 
cians, literary men, artists, scientists, edu- 
cators, sailors, business men, philanthropists, 
pioneers and explorers, inventors, engineers, 
10 



INTRODUCTION 

architects, musicians, actors. He says : " If 
we add the French and the French Hugue- 
nots together, we find that the people of 
French blood exceed absolutely, in the abil- 
ity produced, all the other races represented in 
Appleton's Encyclopedia of American Biog- 
raphy, except the English and Scotch-Irish, 
and show a percentage in proportion to their 
total original immigration much higher than 
that of any other race." This is very high 
authority, and may well be accepted as a rea- 
son for a somewhat fuller recital of the con- 
temporaneous history of the early, as well as 
of the later French colonies in the United 
States. Many names illustrious in French 
history will be found among those of the 
exiles who found refuge in the United States 
in the successive changes in France from the 
outbreak of the French Revolution, through 
the Napoleonic Period, the Bourbon restora- 
tion, the reign of Louis Philippe, the Second 
Republic, the Third Empire, and the Third 
Republic. 

Pierre Leroy Beaulieu, in his exhaustive ac- 
count of the United States in the Twentieth 
11 



INTRODUCTION 

Century (Paris, 1905), gives the number of 
French emigrants who came to the United 
States from 1821 to 1903, as 414,197. This 
number, though small as compared to the ac- 
cessions of other nationalities, must be increased 
by the earlier settlements, those in Louisiana 
and up the valley of the Mississippi, and in 
Virginia and Pennsylvania; by those in Penn- 
sylvania and Ohio after the French Revolution, 
and by the later refugees after the fall of 
Napoleon — a large number in all. 



French Colonists and Exiles 
in the United States 



Early French Settlements in the 
United States 

The oldest permanent European settlement 
in the valley of the Mississippi is the village of 
Kaskaskia ; the seat of a Jesuit mission in 1684, 
it gradually became a central point of French 
civilization. 1 In Illinois La Salle opened the 
way, in 1681, and was followed by Tonti in 

1700, with twenty Canadian settlers. In June, 

1701, Cadillac was sent with one hundred 
French to settle Detroit, the oldest permanent 
settlement in Michigan. D'Iberville in 1698 
opened direct intercourse between France and 
the Mississippi with two hundred settlers, and 
in 1699 his brother, Bienville, began the settle- 
Bancroft: Hist. U. S., vol. iii, p. 195. 

13 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

ments near Mobile. Coxe, the proprietor of 
Carolana, on the Gulf of Mexico, obtained 
from King William permission to send six hun- 
dred French refugees and Vaudois to settle 
there. In 1698 Coxe sold 500,000 acres of 
his grant on the Gulf, to Sir William Waller, 
the Marquis de la Muce, and the Sieur de 
Sailly, on condition that at least two hundred 
Protestant colonists should be planted there 
within two years. 

William III advanced £3,000 to defray the 
expenses of sending to Virginia at least five 
hundred French Protestants under the care of 
Coxe, and successive vessels brought them with 
their clergymen, to Manakintown, on the 
James, but the emigrants were soon in a deplor- 
able state, and the enterprise was shortly 
abandoned. Coxe's son published in London, 
in 1722, 2 his Description of Carolana. Their 
title continued until 1769, when the family 
surrendered the charter of Carolana and re- 
ceived in exchange 100,000 acres of land in 
New York, and the township of Carolana and 
other patents were located in New York under 

2 SculJ's Coxe: Pa. Mag. of History, vol. vii, p. 317. 
14 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

this grant. Vincennes was settled at least as 
early as 1735, and thus began the common- 
wealth of Indiana. 

In 1717, eight hundred emigrants for 
Louisiana began what was hoped to be a colony 
of at least six thousand whites, but in 1727 of 
Law's great colony only thirty needy French- 
men were found, abandoned by their employer. 
In 1736 Alabama was opened to settlers at a 
heavy sacrifice of life. 

It was on the banks of the Mississippi, in 
1768, that uncontrolled impulses first unfurled 
the flag of a republic. 3 The treaty of Paris 
left two European powers sole sovereigns of 
the continent of North America. Spain, ac- 
cepting Louisiana with some hesitation, lost 
France as the bulwark of her possessions, and 
assumed new expenses and new dangers, with 
only the negative advantage of keeping the 
territory from England. Its inhabitants were 
of French origin, and loved the land of their 
ancestry; by every law of nature and human 
freedom, they had the right to protest against 
the transfer of their allegiance. No sooner 

3 Bancroft: Hist. U. S., vol. vi, p. 217. 
15 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

did they hear of the cession of their country 
to the Catholic king, than in the spirit of 
independence an assembly sprang into being, 
representing every parish in the colony, and 
they resolved unanimously to entreat the King 
of France to be touched with their affliction 
and their loyalty, and not to sever them from 
his dominions. At Paris their envoy, with 
Bienville, the time-honored founder of New 
Orleans, a venerable octogenarian, appealed in 
vain to Choiseul. In March, 1766, Ulloa 
landed in New Orleans. The French garrison 
of three hundred refused to enter the Spanish 
service ; the people, to give up their nationality. 
This state of things lasted for two years, 
agitating the colony from one end to the 
other. It was proposed to make of New 
Orleans a republic, with a legislative body of 
forty men and a single executive. The people 
in the country parishes met together, crowded 
in a mass into the city, joined those of New 
Orleans, and formed a numerous assembly. 
They adopted an address, rehearsing their 
griefs, and in their Petition of Rights they 



16 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

claimed freedom of commerce with the ports 
of France and America; the inhabitants of 
Louisiana took up the idea of a republic, as 
the alternative to their renewed connection with 
France. Their hope was to be a colony of 
France or a free commonwealth. " A good 
example for the English colonies," wrote du 
Chatelet to Choiseul, " may they set about fol- 
lowing it." 

At this time Kaskaskia had six hundred 
whites, Cahokia, three hundred; Illinois about 
one thousand in all; Vincennes in Indiana 
about three hundred ; Detroit about six hun- 
dred; New Orleans, eighteen hundred. The 
arrival of the Spanish squadron of twenty-four 
vessels with three thousand troops ended in the 
severe punishment of those who had led in the 
movement against Spain. The estates of twelve 
of the richest and most considerable men in 
the Province were confiscated, five were con- 
demned to be hung, six to imprisonment. 

Parkman in his great works, and since then 

countless writers, have described the great 

achievements of the early French explorers, La 

Salle, Champlain, Marquette, Joliet. La Salle's 
2 17 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

Belle Riviere of 1670 was the Allegheny and 
Ohio, and Celeron de Bienville, sent by Galis- 
soniere, commandant of forces in New France 
and Louisiana, in 1749, was the first European 
to sail on the waters of the Ohio. 

La Salle in 1682 buried at the mouth of the 
Mississippi, a metal plate with the arms of 
France, as an emblem of sovereignty by right 
of discovery. In 1749 Celeron did the same 
thing at the confluence of the Ohio and Cono- 
wango, near what is now Warren, Pennsyl- 
vania, and near the mouths of French Creek 
in what is now Pennsylvania, and of Wheeling 
Creek and the Great Kanawha, in the West 
Virginia of to-day, and of the Muskingum and 
Great Miami Rivers in Ohio. The English in 
turn granted 500,000 acres on the Allegheny 
and Ohio Rivers to the Virginia Company in 
1767. 

It was in surveying this land that Washing- 
ton first made his mark. The grave of Jumon- 
ville, killed in a skirmish by Washington's 
force, is still marked near Uniontown, Pennsyl- 
vania. That skirmish, between thirty-four men 

under Washington and thirty-one Frenchmen, 

18 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

was the opening of the Old French War, which 
finally cost France both Canada and the Ohio 
basin. 

Roosevelt's " Winning of the West " tells 
the story of the men who finally settled that 
great region and made it part of the United 
States. As late as 1778 the French in Vin- 
cennes, learning that France was the ally of 
the United States in the war with Great Britain, 
helped George Rogers Clark in his gallant and 
successful invasion of the great West, which 
he helped to wrest from the mother country 
for the infant republic. But of the lesser 
French settlements and of the individual 
Frenchmen who came to this country, in some 
instances as travellers and visitors, often as 
exiles, there is little record. 

The next colony located within the present 
State of Ohio was that of Gallipolis, settled 
directly from France. 4 This colony of about 
four hundred persons, had been made up in 
Paris, where the principal persons had pur- 

* History of the Discovery and Settlement of the 
Valley of the Mississippi, by John W. Monette (New 
York, 1846, 2 vols.), vol. ii, p. 258, etc. 
19 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

chased a large body of lands from Joel Bar- 
low, agent of the Scioto Company. They had 
paid for their lands at the rate of a French 
crown per acre, while in France, to enable the 
Company to consummate their contract with the 
government. The agent of the Company had 
accompanied them to the Ohio River, and had 
selected for them a beautiful site on the west 
bank, two miles below the Great Kanawha 
River, and within the limits, as was subse- 
quently ascertained, of the Ohio Company's 
purchase. The location having been selected, 
the immigrants remained upon the Ohio River, 
whither they had arrived from Philadelphia 
during the winter, ready to commence their 
new settlement. 

Early in March, 1791, the colony was all 
action and enterprise, clearing land and erecting 
houses and inclosures for their future security 
from Indian hostility. Feace and joy seemed 
to smile upon them, and the arduous toil of 
the day was beguiled by mirth and festivity at 
night, cheered by the melody of the violin and 
the gay dance. But soon they found them- 
selves deceived in a strange land, beset by 
20 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

savage foes, and in fact without a home and 
without money. The Scioto Company could 
not give titles to the land and was not respon- 
sible for the one hundred thousand francs they 
had received from the credulous Frenchmen. 
These were without a remedy. Many of them 
left the country ; others received from Congress 
a grant of 24,000 acres near the Scioto, known 
as the French Grant; others migrated to the 
Wabash, to join their countrymen at Vin- 
cennes ; some returned to Philadelphia and then 
to France. 5 

" Historic Illinois : The Romance of the 
Earlier Days," by Randall Parrish, Chicago, 
1905, is a compilation of information on the 
early settlements in Illinois. By 1712 the 
French population had increased to consider- 
able proportions, most largely concentrated at 
Kaskaskia. By 1763 the Jesuits there had a 
church, a chapel, a house, all built of stone, a 
plantation of two hundred and forty arpents of 
land, well stocked with cattle, and a brewery. 
All was seized under the edict of their expulsion 

"American Pioneer, vol. i, pp. 94, etc.; vol. ii, pp. 
182, etc.; Atwater's Ohio, p. 159. 
21 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

from France, and but little left of the results 
of their hundred years of devotion to the task 
undertaken by them. 

The old trails led from Kaskaskia to the 
Peorias, at the mouth of the Des Moines River, 
and to Detroit, part of the latter still a legal 
highway in continual use. Later Clark laid 
out one to Fort Massac on the Ohio River, 
thus avoiding the old French trail. 

The establishment, in 1682, by La Salle, of 
Fort St. Louis attracted adventurous French- 
men, coureurs de bois, voyageurs, soldiers, fur 
traders, and priests, but with the abandonment 
of the post in 1702 they soon scattered. The 
oldest permanent settlement, not only in Illi- 
nois, but in the entire Mississippi valley, was 
that of Kaskaskia, "Notre Dame de Cascas- 
quias," — first an Indian village, then a mis- 
sionary station, then slowly gathered a vagrant 
white population. By 1766 there were about 
one hundred families, French and English, 
many of the original French inhabitants having 
gone to St. Louis. Most of the settlers of 
Kaskaskia came from New Orleans, those of 

Cahokia from Canada ; Prairie du Rocher, four- 

22 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

teen miles from Kaskaskia, grew up about Fort 
Chartres. The names of some of the earliest 
colonists of Illinois are preserved in the records 
at Quebec. 

The early histories of Illinois describe their 
homes, — they were largely descendants from 
emigrants from Picardy and Normandy. In 
1720 Major Pierre Dugue Boisbriant, some of 
whose descendants yet reside at Prairie du 
Rocher, accompanied by one hundred men, 
came up from New Orleans, and sixteen miles 
from Kaskaskia built Fort Chartres. In 1721 
Renault brought two hundred miners and five 
hundred slaves to work the mines he expected 
to discover. In 1745 the Illinois country sent 
400,000 pounds of grain to New Orleans, the 
surplus product of a population of about nine 
hundred all told. 

At Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Prairie du Rocher, 
Prairie du Pont, and St. Philippe, the peasantry 
in their picturesque costumes, conspicuous with 
coloring, mingled with gentlemen who, even in 
that wilderness, clung to the Parisian garb, 
with the French soldiers in their blue uniforms 
and white facings, the black-robed Jesuits, and 
23 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

the stolid Indian warriors. After 1721 black 
slaves were numerous throughout the settle- 
ments. These were originally St. Domingo 
negroes brought by Renault to labor in his 
mines, but twenty years later sold to the 
colonists. In 1750 there were five French vil- 
lages with eleven hundred whites, three hundred 
blacks, and sixty savages. At Le Pe, now 
Peoria ; at Chicago, possibly at Rock Island 
and Quincy, there were small stockaded forts 
with a few French settlers. A trading-post 
was established on the Missouri side of the river 
at New Madrid as early as 1740. The region 
was notable for bears, and the principal trade 
was the sale of bear's grease, hence the name, 
L'Anse de la Graisse. The fortified trading- 
post of Vincennes was established in 1722, but 
did not become a French settlement until twelve 
years later. These isolated communities fur- 
nished many French volunteer soldiers. 

Thus flourished for nearly a hundred years 
these communities of French pioneers. They 
accomplished little of permanent value. Their 
forts have crumbled into dust ; their towns have 

disappeared beneath the encroaching waters 

24 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

or have decayed and passed away; only a few 
remnants have escaped the inflowing tide of 
American population, and they also are fast 
losing the peculiarities of their fathers. In 
1791 by special act of Congress four hundred 
acres of land were granted to each head of a 
family who had made improvements in Illinois 
prior to 1788. A list of names of those en- 
titled shows two hundred and forty-four, of 
whom eighty were Americans, the others 
French. Allowing five to a family, this would 
make eight hundred and twenty. In 1791 
under the militia law there were two hundred 
and twenty-five Frenchmen capable of bearing 
arms. 

Renault, St. Philippe, Prairie du Rocher, 
Fort Chartres, Massac, Kaskaskia, Cahokia, 
Fort St. Louis, Fort Crevecoeur, are names that 
still reveal the sites of early French settlements 
in Illinois, while Father Allouez, Aubry, Bar- 
beau, Barbier, Baugy, Beausoleil, Bellefon- 
taine, Bienville, Noel Blanc, Boilvin, Boisron- 
det, Bossu, Bourdon, Bouthillier, Brossard, 
Chevet, De Montbrun, Du Page, Galland, Ger- 
main, Guyon, La Forest, La Grange, Le 

25 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

Comte, Meillet, Membre, Menard, Moreau, 
Pachot, Saussier, are a few of the French names 
of individuals who reveal the French element in 
Illinois. 

C Roosevelt's " Winning of the West " [New 
York, 1894*] has many suggestive references 
to early and later French settlements. 6 
Mobile in 1781 was described by an early 
French traveller (Le Gal, Paris, 1802) as a 
little terrestrial paradise, with about forty 
proprietary families. 

In 1784 there were four hundred French 
families in the Illinois country, a like number 
at Vincennes, and four hundred and forty at 
Kaskaskia and Cahokia. In 1778 the British 
Governor, Hamilton, reported the number of 
settlers at Vincennes as six hundred and twenty- 
one. 

Roosevelt describes the life of the French 
Creoles, and quotes Collot's account of them 
and of the great fur trade built up by one of 
them, Gratiot. The French settlers of the 
Illinois and Wabash country quarrelled with 

"Roosevelt: "Winning of the West," vol. i, pp. 31, 
35; vol. ii, pp. 39, 78. 

26 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

the new American comers, whose energy dis- 
turbed their easy-going life. In 1786 Vin- 
cennes had upwards of three hundred houses, 
and sixty American families took refuge there 
from the hostile Indians. The old French 
families complained of the abuses inflicted on 
them in poor return for the hospitality ex- 
tended to the refugees, and General Clark es- 
tablished a garrison of one hundred and fifty 
men of his command to keep order. To punish 
marauding Indians an attack was made on a 
settlement of French Indian traders in Cum- 
berland County, Kentucky, in which the latter 
suffered for the help they had given the 
Indians. French and Americans alike suffered 
at the hands of the Spanish in their efforts to 
stop trade with New Orleans ; some of the 
French moved to the west (Spanish) side of 
the Mississippi, to enjoy the benefit of their 
protection. 

In 1787 there were five hundred and twenty 
French at Vincennes, one hundred and ninety- 
one at Kaskaskia, two hundred and thirty-nine 
at Cahokia, eleven at St. Philippe, seventy- 
eight at Prairie du Rocher, ten hundred and 
27 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

thirty-nine in all, or as another account put it, 
one thousand and forty French at the six vil- 
lages on the Wabash and the Illinois, as against 
two hundred and forty Americans, of which 
one hundred and three were at Vincennes and 
one hundred and thirty-seven in the Illinois 
country. 7 Roosevelt quotes from a memorial 
of the French settlers to Congress for a con- 
firmation of the titles to their lands ; their agent 
Tardiveau, a French mercantile adventurer, 
had relations with the Spanish agents and the 
Kentucky separatists. General Harmar, in 
taking possession of Vincennes and the French 
towns, spoke well of the " Creoles," but said 
they could best be governed in the manner to 
which they were accustomed, by a commandant 
with a few troops. Sprung as they were from 
French soldiers, naturally they preferred a 
strong military rule. The American settlers 
were almost all soldiers of the Revolutionary 
armies, — hard-working, orderly men of trained 
courage and keen intellect, courteous, indus- 
trious and law-abiding. A fortnight after the 

* Roosevelt: "Winning of the West," vol. iii, pp. 235, 
237, 239, 263, 266, 272. 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

passage of the ordinance of 1787 for the gov- 
ernment of the Northwest Territory, the Ohio 
Company bought a million and a half acres 
north of the Ohio, and three and a half mil- 
lions more were authorized to be sold to the 
Scioto Company, nominally at seventy cents an 
acre, but as payment was made in depreciated 
public securities, the real price was only eight 
or nine cents an acre. Manasseh Cutler was the 
leader in these ventures, and on his first trip up 
the Ohio was cared for by a well-to-do Creole 
trader from the Illinois, Francis Vigo, who had 
welcomed Clark when he took Kaskaskia. 

At a dinner given to the officers of Fort 
Harmar on July 4, 1787, one of the toasts 
was to the King of France. Even in the 
Indian wars, the Creoles suffered little at the 
hands of the savages. Clark had given the 
name of Louisville in honor of that king of 
France whose alliance, he hoped, would render 
easier the task of winning over the inhabitants 
of the Illinois, just as later on Marietta was so 
called in honor of Marie Antoinette and to 
allure the royalist exiles to Ohio. Earlier al- 
ready Patrick Henry, Governor of Virginia, 
29 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

had advised Clark to secure the friendship of 
the French, and they stood him in good stead 
in rescuing the West from the British. This, 
too, made the French towns outposts for the 
protection of the settlers. Between the increas- 
ing flow from the old States and the attacks 
of the British with their French-Canadian and 
Indian allies, the old French settlements were 
in hard plight. Frenchmen were appointed to 
most of the civilian offices, while the military 
posts were under Americans. While French- 
men, layman and priest, helped the Americans 
with money and goods, the French resorted to 
punishment of their negroes of such severity as 
to shock even the frontiersmen. 

Genet's plans to organize an armed expedi- 
tion on the Ohio River in 1793-4 to conquer 
Louisiana, as Spain was then an ally of Eng- 
land and at war with France, found support in 
the discontented adventurers of the West, led 
by General Clark. 8 Genet commissioned him 
as a major-general in the service of the French 
Republic, and sent out various Frenchmen, — 

•Roosevelt: "Winning of the West," vol. iv, pp. 176, 
182, 243, 268. 

30 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

Michaux (nominally on a scientific tour of ex- 
ploration), La Chaise, Collot, and others, with 
civil and military titles, — to cooperate with 
Clark, but the movement collapsed with Genet's 
recall. Clark tried to get reimbursement from 
the French government for the " expenses of 
expedition ordered by Citizen Genet," but of 
course without result. 

In 1791 the most pitiable group of emi- 
grants that reached the West at this time was 
formed by the French who came to the town of 
Gallipolis, on the Ohio. They were mostly 
refugees from the Revolution, who had been 
taken in by a swindling land company. They 
were utterly unsuited to life in the wilderness, 
being gentlemen, small tradesmen, lawyers, and 
the like. Unable to grapple with the wild life 
into which they found themselves plunged, the}' 
sank into shiftless poverty, not one in fifty 
showing industry and capacity to succeed. 
Congress took pity on them and granted them 
24,000 acres in Scioto County, the tract being 
known as the French Grant; but no gift of 
wild land was able to insure their prosperity. 

By degrees they were absorbed into the neigh- 
31 






FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

boring communities, a few succeeding, most 
ending their lives in abject failure. 

In 1800 Napoleon was planning for France 
the reestablishment in America of that colonial 
empire which a generation before had been 
wrested from her by England. His great am- 
bition halted at the tremendous sacrifice of 
French troops in the failure of the West-Indian 
military expedition, and the great demands of 
Bernadotte and Victor as the conditions on 
which they would undertake to establish a 
French imperial colony in Louisiana, Texas, 
and Mexico. 

In " Mount Desert, a History," by Geo. E. 
Street, Boston, 1905, there is a brief sketch of 
the efforts towards French colonization by 
Roberval and La Roche, with reference to 
Winsor's " Cartier to Frontenac," and an ac- 
count of the organized French colony on the St. 
Croix. The French plans of colonization were 
made under Henry IV, who in 1599 
commissioned Pierre Chauvin to colonize 
America, and later gave a like commission to 
Du Guast, Sieur de Monts, set forth in Baird's 
" Huguenot Emigration to America," vol. i, 
32 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

pp. 341-7, and in Fiske's " New France and 
New England." The colony on Mount Desert 
was brought there in 1613, but it was of short 
duration. The only trace of it is in the names 
given by the French. In 1688 Mount Desert 
was granted to Cadillac by Louis XIV ; he made 
a short stay there, going later to Mackinac and 
then to Detroit and finally to Louisiana as 
Governor, 1712-17, and leaving his name con- 
nected with points in eight of the present States 
of the Union. Parkman's " Frontenac " and 
Margry's " Relations ct Memoirs Inedits " 
give particulars of his active career. The Baron 
de St. Castine settled on the site of the present 
town of Castine, Maine, and left a family of 
half-breed children, who were driven off by the 
English, and all trace of them is lost after 
their return to France. In 1786 the Gregoires 
as descendants, on the wife's side, of Cadillac, 
obtained from Massachusetts a grant of land 
on the west side of Mt. Desert Island, settled 
at what is now called Hull's Cove, built a house 
and mill and began to farm. The husband 
died in 1810, the wife in 1811, and the children 
returned to France and were lost sight of. The 
3 33 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

French colonies on Mt. Desert were short 
lived but are recalled there by the recently 
erected cross as a memorial of their landing at 
St. Sauveur. Their early explorations of the 
coast of New England have of late years been 
republished and their maps have an historical 
interest and are remarkably accurate. 



w%%% (Tgg^ w%w$ 

«4raK» ^^s eJrate 



ii 

French Colonies in Louisiana 

Fortier's History of Louisiana is written 
by one whose family settled in New Orleans 
shortly after its foundation in 1718. He 
naturally takes pride in relating the history of 
the events on the soil of Louisiana for the last 
two hundred years, for in nearly all of them 
men of his name or blood took part. La Salle 
gave the name of Louisiana in 1679, in honor 
of Louis XIV, and in 1682 took formal posses- 
sion in the king's name, planting a cross and 
burying a leaden plate with a record of the 
fact. He established Fort St. Louis among 
the Illinois, and after an interview with the 
King, brought out, in 1684, soldiers, me- 
chanics, laborers, volunteers, several families, 
and a number of girls, his brother who was a 
Sulpician priest, with others of that order, 
and three Recollet friars. On his way from 

what is now Texas, where he landed by mistake 
35 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

at Matagorda Bay, which he took for one of 
the mouths of the Mississippi, to Canada, to 
get help for his colony, he was killed by his 
companions in 1687, thus wrecking his plans, 
and leaving it for Iberville and Bienville to 
found Louisiana. They landed in 1699, built 
a fort, manned it, and named the two lakes 
Maurepas and Pontchartrain, in honor of the 
Ministers under whose auspices he had made 
his expedition. A geologist, Lcsueur, went 
out in search of minerals. Iberville, on his 
third and last voyage, found only one hundred 
and fifty persons in the colony. More than 
sixty had died. He sent his brother Bienville 
to found another colony on Mobile River. In 
1704 he reported one hundred and eighty men 
bearing arms, twenty-seven French families, 
some slaves, four ecclesiastics, eighty wooden 
houses, nine oxen, fourteen cows, four bulls, 
five calves, one hundred hogs, three goats, four 
hundred chickens. A census of 1706 gives the 
names of the settlers with the number of their 
families, making eighty-two in all, and a list of 
the cattle, forty-six head in all. In 1708 a 
report gave the population as composed of a 
36 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

garrison of one hundred and twenty-two per- 
sons, including priests, workmen and boys, one 
hundred and fifty-seven inhabitants, men, 
women, and children, besides sixty wandering 
Canadians and eighty Indian slaves, and four- 
teen hundred hogs, two thousand chickens, and 
about one hundred head of cattle. 

In 1712 Louisiana was granted to Crozat 
for fifteen years, and Cadillac, the founder of 
Detroit, was made governor, but was soon re- 
moved. In 1717 the colony contained seven 
hundred, of all ages, sexes, and colors. In 
1710 Mobile was founded, and in 1717 three 
companies of infantry and fifty settlers came. 
In that year Crozat surrendered his charter 
and the colony was given to John Law, who 
made it part of his Company of the Indies. In 
1718 Bienville as governor, founded New 
Orleans. In 1721 the colony numbered about 
six thousand, including six hundred negroes. 
In 1722 New Orleans was made the capital, and 
Charlevoix said it had about one hundred huts, 
a large store, and a few other buildings, yet he 
predicted a brilliant future. Le Page du 

Pratz in his History of Louisiana (Paris, 
37 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

1758), gives his own personal experience dur- 
ing his stay in the colony from 1718 to 1734. 
Dumont, who was twenty-two years in Louisi- 
ana, gave an account of the colony in his book, 
and the archives of the Colonial Office in Paris 
contain frequent census returns, showing the 
condition of the colony in 1721, 1723, 1726, 
1727, and its increase in numbers and pros- 
perity, in spite of Indian wars, mismanage- 
ment by the home government, and troubles of 
the local authorities. Then came the cession to 
Spain, in 1764, and in 1765 the French left 
Fort Chartres, in the territory ceded to Great 
Britain, crossed the Mississippi, and founded 
St. Louis, the first settlement of what is now 
Missouri. Then came the Acadians, refugees 
from British oppression, who in time became 
a source of wealth to Louisiana by their indus- 
try. L'Abbe Casgrain estimates their descend- 
ants as numbering one hundred thousand. With 
the cession to Spain, the colony lost its pros- 
perity, and after fruitless appeals to France 
there was a short-lived revolution, for the 
population of less than twelve thousand, of 

whom half were slaves, could not resist the 
38 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

power of Spain. It gave Louisiana the glory 
of having thought of establishing a republican 
form of government in America in 1768, eight 
years before the Declaration of Independence. 
It ended in punishment of the leaders by death, 
imprisonment, exile, and confiscation, that left 
Spain unpopular. 

Although under Spanish rule, Louisiana, 
through the successful campaign of Galvez 
against the English and his capture of Pensa- 
cola with the surrender of English and Waldeck 
troops, can proudly boast of having aided the 
Americans in the war for Independence of the 
United States. In 1785 a number of Aca- 
dians came to Louisiana at the expense of the 
King of France and were settled through the 
country. It was Bore, born at Kaskaskia, in 
the Illinois district, in 1741, of an old Norman 
family, educated in France at a military school, 
and settling in Louisiana in 1768, who success- 
fully introduced the sugar industry there. 

In 1798 Louis Philippe and his brothers 

visited New Orleans and were received with 

great cordiality, one of the richest men of the 

colony, Poydras, loaning them money. In 
39 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

1800 Berthier, who had served under Rocham- 
beau, made on behalf of Napoleon the treaty 
of St. Ildefonso, confirmed by a later treaty at 
Madrid signed by Lucien Bonaparte, by which 
Louisiana became again a French colony. 
Later, in 1803, Rochambeau (the son) sur- 
rendered St. Domingo to the blacks, and many 
exiles went to Louisiana, to join their friends 
who had already taken refuge there. Berna- 
dotte was appointed captain-general of Louisi- 
ana, but as he demanded three thousand soldiers 
and as many agriculturists, Bonaparte declared 
he would not do as much for one of his brothers, 
appointed Bernadotte Minister to the United 
States, an office he declined, and General Victor 
was made captain-general and Laussat colonial 
prefect, — the former with a salary of 70,000 
francs, the latter 50,000, — but the expedition 
to Louisiana was abandoned, Victor never 
sailed, and all he did was to draw his salary 
and issue a bombastic proclamation. 

Pontalba, who left a memoir on Louisiana, 
was born in New Orleans in 1754, educated in 
France, served under Noailles and D'Estaing 
at the siege of Savannah in 1779, resigned and 

40 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

returned to New Orleans in 1784. Pontalba 
submitted to Napoleon a memoir on Louisiana, 
in which he said : " In the hands of France, 
the colony must be called to the most brilliant 
destiny, and be a source of riches for the 
metropolis. Almost all the Louisianians are 
born French or are of French origin. They 
would again become French with enthusiasm. 
The deficit of $337,000 will be covered in a 
few years merely by the progress of the sugar 
plantations. People it, it will become an inex- 
haustible source of wealth for France." This 
memoir, dated Paris, 29 Fructidor, year IX 
(September 15, 1801), was presented to 
General Bonaparte by Decres, after the treaty 
of 1800 conveyed Louisiana back to France. 
Laussat reached New Orleans in March, 
1803, and issued a proclamation that said: 
" Your separation from France marks one of 
the most shameful epochs of her annals, under 
a government already weak and corrupt, after 
an ignominious war, and as the result of a 
shameful peace," and received a simple and 
dignified address in reply, signed by the prin- 
cipal inhabitants, followed by one from the 

41 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

planters, full of gratitude for the return to 
France. Yet on April 30, 1803, the treaty 
ceding Louisiana to the United States was 
signed in Paris. Laussat had denounced the 
report as an impudent and incredible falsehood 
to assist the partisans of Jefferson ! 

The transfer was made on November 30, 
1803, with solemn ceremonies, — Laussat and 
the Spanish general exchanged civilities, and 
the former finally handed Louisiana over to the 
United States Commissioners on December 20, 
1803. Napoleon was largely guided by Decres, 
who had served in the French army in the 
American War of Independence, and Barbe 
Marbois, who had been the French diplomatic 
representative in this country, and had an 
American wife (Miss Moore of Chester County, 
Pennsylvania). He wrote a History of Louis- 
iana and tells the story of Napoleon's decision, 
to enable him to wage war in Europe against 
England with American money. 

Laussat left " Memoirs," printed at Paris 

in 1831, from which Professor Fortier has 

drawn much interesting material. The French 

flag was escorted by a company of fifty French 
42 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

citizens, who had served in the French army, 
from the beginning of the Revolution, and tears 
were shed when the French flag disappeared 
from the shores of Louisiana. There were some 
signs of hostility between French and Ameri- 
cans, but these soon ceased. Robin, who was 
also present, wrote a book in which he makes a 
record of his own observations of the cession, 
and his voyage to Louisiana is of interest and 
value from the period of his visit. 

Professor Fortier gives the dates of the 
French settlements in the Illinois country and 
upper Louisiana : old Kaskaskia in the " terres- 
trial paradise " at the end of the Seventeenth 
Century ; Fort Chartres in 1720, nearby Caho- 
kia, Prairie du Rocher, etc., Kaskaskia with a 
college and monastery of the Jesuits in 1721, 
chartered in 1725 ; Vincennes in 1735 ; St. 
Louis in 1764, by Chouteau, with thirty men, 
increased in 1765 by families leaving the coun- 
try ceded to the British. It remained prac- 
tically French even after the cession to 
Spain. 

Among the noteworthy Frenchmen who took 



43 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

part in the battle of New Orleans was General 
Humbert, who was a brigadier in the French 
army, served in Vendee, was in 1798 com- 
mander-in-chief of the French expedition to 
Ireland, later took part in the unfortunate 
expedition to St. Domingo, lost the favor of 
Napoleon, came to New Orleans, where he 
taught school; in 1816 went to Mexico to fight 
for its independence, but was unsuccessful, and 
returned to New Orleans, where he died in 1823. 
Latour, of the French Polytechnic School, was 
one of the principal engineers of Jackson's 
army. Lefebvre, a soldier of the Republic 
under Bonaparte, served the mortars. Gen- 
eral Moreau had suggested the points of de- 
fence. Lakanal, the conventionnel, was princi- 
pal of the College of Orleans; he came to the 
city of New Orleans after the restoration of 
the Bourbons, proscribed as a regicide. Con- 
gress made him a grant of land, and he lived 
on a farm on Mobile Bay, until he returned to 
France, in 1837, where he died in 1845, hon- 
ored for his work in science. 

The Hunter Dunbar expedition up the 
Washita in 1804 found two large land grants 

44 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

located on the Washita, that of the Marquis de 
Maison Rouge and twelve leagues square above 
it, that of the Baron de Bastrop. 

In 1804 Robin, a French traveller (he pub- 
lished his account in Paris in 1807), said the 
American government was doing nothing to 
advance American settlement. The forest 
Americans (backwoodsmen) were not com- 
parable to the robust French as emigrants. 1 
All the early American expeditions were ma- 
terially helped by French settlers, trappers, 
etc. In 1805 two Frenchmen from Illinois, 
Lalande and Durocher, and later, in 1806, 
three more joined Pike's expedition and gave 
him much useful information. 2 

The Chouteau family enjoyed for twenty 
years the exclusive privilege ( from the Spanish 
and French governments) of trading up the 
Osage River, before Pike came to the Osage 
country in 1806. It was through French 
traders that he learned of the safe return of 
Lewis and Clark to St. Louis from their epoch- 

1 Robin's Travels, vol. ili, p. 141. 
3 Cox: The Early Exploration of Louisiana, pp. 12, 
etc. University of Cincinnati Press, 1906. 
45 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

making expedition. Perrin du Lac in his 
Travels says: In 1801 he found in Elizabeth- 
town, New Jersey, a number of French refugees 
from St. Domingo and Guadeloupe. Near 
Harrisburg he met a Frenchman who had been 
by turn, soldier, merchant, government em- 
ployee, musician, and was earning his living as 
a dancing master. 

At Gallipolis he found a hundred and sixty 
people, all that were left of six hundred families 
emigrated from France in 1790-91, only to find 
that the Scioto Company had sold them land 
to which it had no title. After four years of 
misery Congress gave them land sixty miles 
from Gallipolis, but most of the owners sold 
it for nominal prices, while a few remained in 
poverty at Gallipolis. 

Perin says that it is due to the Baron de 
Carondelet, the Spanish governor of Louisiana, 
that acknowledgment be made him for his suc- 
cessful opposition to the establishment of the 
Inquisition, urgently solicited by the Bishop. 
In " Louisiana : A Record of Expansion," 
by Albert Phelps (American Commonwealths, 

New York, 1905), there are references to the 
46 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

" First French Settlements in Louisiana," and 
the foundation of Mobile in 1701 by Bienville 
under Iberville's orders, from Hamilton's 
" Colonial Mobile," and Margry's collections. 
It was under Law's vast grant and powers 
that the full tide began to reach Louisiana. 
The emigrants, hurried out to fill seignorial 
grants, began to arrive in swarms. The 
first three shiploads arrived in 1718. The 
colony responded to the European enthu- 
siasm. In June three hundred colonists for the 
Mississippi arrived ; one hundred and fifty-one 
of these were sent to the Natchez; eighty-two 
to the Yazoos, and sixty-eight to New Orleans. 
Ship after ship came in loaded with set- 
tlers; in August, 1718, there had arrived eight 
hundred in three ships, and among them Le 
Page du Pratz, the first historian of Louisiana. 
One hundred were sent to the Illinois, others 
to the Mississippi, to Bay St. Louis, Biloxi, 
and Mobile. 

Later on, under Spanish rule, the governor, 

Carondclet, encouraged the immigration of 

French royalists fleeing from the horrors of the 

Revolution, welcoming them as an offset to the 

47 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

Republicans, who, encouraged by " Citizen " 
Genet and his emissaries, from Philadelphia, 
had set on foot plans for the recapture of 
Louisiana for France. On the Washita 
(Ouachita) River he granted twelve square 
leagues to the Baron de Bastrop ; thirty thou- 
sand acres to the Marquis de Maison Rouge, 
and ten thousand square arpents to De Lassus 
and St. Vrain. These concessions were not 
settled by the proprietors, but they were 
destined to play a part in the famous scheme 
of Aaron Burr some years later. In 1797 
Carondelet was made uneasy by the presence 
of the French General Collot, who had been 
making maps and plans and inspecting the 
miniature forts near New Orleans. He ar- 
rested Collot and sent him to Philadelphia on 
the rumor that France was eager to regain 
Louisiana and that Collot had been sent to 
reconnoitre the ground. 

Gayarre in " A Louisiana Sugar Plantation 
of the Old Regime " {Harper's Magaz'vne, 
March, 1887), gives a complete picture of a 
typical Louisiana plantation in the old days 

before American control. It was the planta- 
48 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

tion of Etienne de Bore, the patron saint of 
Louisiana sugar planters. The table was 
free to every white traveller, even the humblest 
wayfarer. The Bore plantation was typical of 
all the large plantations of sugar, cotton, 
indigo, and tobacco. 

The incident of the single attempt to estab- 
lish the Holy Inquisition in Louisiana is typical 
of the kindly tolerance of the French Creoles. 
In 1789 the Spanish Capuchin Antonio de 
Sedella, under the new policy of the bigoted 
Carlos IV, was appointed emissary of the In- 
quisition to Louisiana. His portrait is in the 
Cathedral — a tall, gaunt figure. He had his 
agents and his implements of torture, and 
made his investigations with secrecy and cau- 
tion. Apparently when his first victims had 
been chosen, he applied to Governor Miro for 
a file of soldiers that he might need. Mir6 
sent the soldiers, not, however, to assist 
the Holy Office, but to arrest the representative 
of the Inquisition and pack him off to Spain, 
with a bold justification of his act, " lest the 
mere name of the Inquisition uttered in New 

Orleans would check immigration, which is 
4 49 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

successfully progressing, and would drive away 

those who have recently come." Father Sedella 

returned to Louisiana, and remained for many 

years the most beloved of priests ; when he died, 

in 1829, the whole city mourned for him — 

hermit, saint, friend of the people. 

In the War of 1812 Great Britain counted 

on the help of the great number of refugees 

from Jamaica, St. Domingo, Guadeloupe, and 

other West Indian islands. It was hoped 

they might be induced to assist the British 

invasion, and that the contraband traders and 

smugglers might be employed as effective 

auxiliaries. The latter, known by the general 

name of Baratarians, were daring men, 

refugees from the French West Indies, who 

under letters of marque from France and from 

the young republic of Carthagena, preyed 

upon British commerce as privateers. Some 

time about the year 1809 there had come to 

New Orleans from Bayonne or Bordeaux the 

brothers Pierre and Jean Lafitte. They were 

soon known as the chief agents of the Bara- 

tarian smugglers. Jean Lafitte acquired such 

an ascendency over them that his orders re- 
50 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

ceived instant obedience, while he maintained 
his place among the quiet citizens of New 
Orleans. Gay aire's Historical Sketch of Pierre 
and Jean Lafitte gives an exhaustive account 
of their strange career. Latour in his His- 
torical Memoir confirms their services to Gen- 
eral Jackson in his defence of New Orleans. 
He found the Baratarians men after his own 
heart, accepted Jean Lafitte's offer of trained 
gunners, and promised to obtain pardon for 
them from the President. They manned the 
forts, and the two chief batteries were given 
to Dominique Yon and Beluche, with their fel- 
low pirates and some veteran gunners of the 
French army. General Humbert was one of 
Jackson's active aids. The victory of the 8th 
of January was thus largely due to French- 
men and to the French Creoles, descendants 
of the early settlers, who thus attested their 
fidelity to the government of the United States. 



Ill 

The Huguenot Settlers 

Baird tells the sad story of the early attempt 
to settle a French colony in Florida, in the 
Seventeenth Century. Ribaut was chosen by 
Coligny to lead the first expedition. He landed 
near Beaufort, South Carolina; returning to 
France and entering the Huguenot ranks, he 
led, at the suggestion of Coligny, the third 
expedition, which ended in his murder by the 
Spaniards. Laudonniere led the second expe- 
dition, but was superseded by Ribaut. 

Baird gives in great detail the names of the 
Huguenot refugees who sought and found 
shelter in the American colonies, from Maine 
to South Carolina. Many of the descendants 
are still found in the United States, often 
with names changed, yet easily recognizable. 
Among them were clergymen, men of educa- 
tion and attainments, some who had held im- 
portant positions in France; others were 
53 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

mariners, merchants and tradesmen, and arti- 
sans, and their new home profited by their 
virtues. 

Francis Marion, the brave soldier in the 
American War of Independence, was the 
worthy descendant of a Huguenot exile. Paul 
Revere is another Huguenot name famous in 
American heroic history. Faneuil Hall in 
Boston perpetuates another. Of others, the 
history of America has examples in famous 
soldiers and great sailors, in statesmen, in 
bishops and noted clergymen, — indeed, in every 
walk of life the descendants of Huguenots 
exiled to America have strengthened the his- 
toric ties between France and the United States. 

The Le Contes have rendered notable services 

to natural science in successive generations. 

Rhode Island welcomed some of the LTuguenot 

exiles, and Penn invited others to his province. 

All of the American colonies were anxious to 

secure the Huguenots as settlers, and they 

came both as individuals and in quite large 

bodies. In New Rochelle they secured a tract 

of land and built a church and endowed it 

with a glebe, and to this day the French lan- 
53 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

guage is used in the Huguenot Church in 
Charleston, South Carolina, in pious rev- 
erence. 

Many hundreds, aided by generous grants 
from the crown, came to Virginia and suffered 
no little hardship from the unscrupulous land- 
owners and speculators. Those who came to 
New England fared better, and more than re- 
turned by their prosperity the help extended 
to them. They were successful merchants and 
sturdy fighters and patriotic citizens, and 
names such as Bowdoin, Faneuil, and Revere, 
are typical of the addition to New England 
of the French Huguenots as an element of good 
in its growth and development. 

A monument erected in 1884 perpetuates the 
memory of the Huguenot settlers in Oxford, 
then a frontier town in Massachusetts, and the 
story of their hardships is preserved in many 
records. It was not until 1721 that the set- 
tlement was finally broken up and its tract of 
twenty-five hundred acres sold. Of the settlers 
the Sigourneys, the Bowdoins, the Dupuys and 
others joined the families living elsewhere, and 
Hartford and New York and Newport and 
54 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

New Rochelle welcomed this addition to their 
number. 

The early settlers in East Greenwich, Rhode 
Island, in a locality still known as Frenchtown, 
were soon scattered by quarrels of the claimants 
for the land and by unfair treatment. Baird 
prints a " Mapp of the [lands of the] French 
Refugee Gentlemen who are all turned out by 
the Road Islanders," reproduced from the orig- 
inal prepared by Ayrault in a petition for 
redress, still in the British State Paper Office. 
Ayrault's name is perpetuated in a street in 
Newport, where his son removed. Others 
joined their fellow Huguenots in more flourish- 
ing colonies, but Providence and Bristol and 
Newport still bear in pious memory the good 
done by those who remained in Rhode Island. 
The story of the Huguenots in America, as 
told by Baird and in many local and family 
histories, is a very interesting and important 
chapter in the varied history of the French 
settlers in the United States. It shows how 
valuable an element was thus infused into the 
varied streams that have gathered together in 

the people of the great republic. 
55 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

A French Protestant church was established 
in New York in the Seventeenth Century. 
French Huguenot refugees took up a tract of 
six thousand acres near that city, at New 
Rochelle, a name suggesting their old home in 
France. One hundred acres were set apart for 
the endowment of a church, and of the ninety 
members many of the names are still familiar in 
New York, while these again are often perpetu- 
ated in the streets of the city. In 172-i a 
quarrel in the Huguenot Church in New York 
became matter of record in its Documentary 
History, nearly a hundred men and women 
members of the congregation signing for one 
side, with only eight on the other, but these 
including the pasteur, l'Ansien [sic], and six 
of the consistory. In 1761-62 the members 
of the French Church at New Rochelle are on 
record as petitioners to Governor Colden, recit- 
ing that in 1681 their land was granted to 
them. 1 

1 Registers of the Births, Marriages and Deaths of 
the French Church in New York from 1689 to 1804.— 
Collections of the Huguenot Society of New York, 
vol. i. New York, 1886. 

56 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

The first French service was held in New 
York in 1628. In 1623 thirty families of 
Walloon or French came to the Delaware, to 
Connecticut, and up the Hudson. Additions 
came in 1625 and 1626, and between 1628 and 
1638, and between 1648 and 1658. Many of 
the descendants became leading citizens and 
some of them important men in the history of 
the United States. 

Stapleton's " Memorials of the Huguenots 
in America, with special reference to their 
Emigration to Pennsylvania," Carlisle, Penn- 
sylvania, 1901, is supplementary to Baird's 
" Huguenot Emigration to America," and 
mentions the contributions to a knowledge of 
their settlements in Pennsylvania, Virginia, 
New England, and South Carolina. In Charles- 
ton, South Carolina, their memory is kept alive 
by the French service in the Huguenot Church. 
In New York and in New England the names 
of the Huguenot settlers are still familiar in 
Bowdoin, Revere, and many others well known. 
In Pennsylvania there were many settlers of 
French Huguenot faith. The first distinct 
settlement was that led by Mme. Ferree 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

to a large tract of land bought by her in Lan- 
caster County in 1709. Her son and her son- 
in-law, Isaac Lefever, settled in Pequea, and 
their names and descendants are now widely 
scattered. In 1712 Isaac de Turk settled near 
Oley in Berks County, and he and his fellow 
French settlers through their numerous de- 
scendants maintained their native language 
down to quite recent times. The lists of emi- 
grants given in the Pennsylvania Archives con- 
tain many names of French families coming 
to Pennsylvania in 1736 and on for a number 
of years, from Alsace and Lorraine. Their 
sons won distinction as soldiers in the War of 
Independence, and in important civil posts. 
In Delaware and in Maryland there were nu- 
merous French settlers, notably the Bayards. 
Of the Du Ponts the earliest was a settler on 
the Santee in South Carolina in 1694. His 
grand-nephew, Pierre Samuel Du Pont de 
Nemours, an active Girondist in France, and 
well known by his writings as an economist 
and by his activity in public life, followed his 
sons, who had established industries on the 
Brandywine that have made them famous 

58 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

From this family sprung Admiral Du Pont and 
General Du Pont and other useful citizens. 
Among Penn's early settlers were some French, 
and very good citizens they were. The Doz, 
De la Val, Du Castle, Reboteau, of the Isle du 
Rhe, Imbert of Nisme, Le Chevalier of Nor- 
mandy, Boudinots, Duches of La Rochelle, 
Benezet of Montpellier, all are well known. 
The Cressons were from Picardy, the Gar- 
rigues from Montpellier, and the Cassers from 
Languedoc. The records of Christ Church 
and of the Lutheran churches of Philadelphia 
are full of the names of these early French 
Huguenot settlers and their families. In Ger- 
mantown were the Le Bruns, De la Plaines, and 
later the Duvals, Clapiers, and many others, 
and Duval Street and Clapier Street still per- 
petuate their old homes. In the Perkiomen and 
Lower Schuylkill valleys were Boyers, De 
Frains or De Fresnes, Pechins, Purviances, 
Tregos, Dubois, La Barres, Le Quais, De la 
Cours, Bigonets, Loreaux, who became Lorah; 
Le Char, Leshers ; Retteaus, Rettew ; Perdeaus, 
Barto ; while in the rich Oley Valley of Berks 

County were De Turks, Bertolets, De Bonne- 
59 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

villes, De Vaus, De la Planch, now Planks ; 
while nearer Reading settled Dubrees, Boilieus, 
Tonnelliers, who became Kieffers, and in this 
as in many other cases the French origin was 
almost lost. In the upper Delaware and Le- 
high country are found De Normandie, 
Bessonet, Le Valleau, De Pue, now De Pew; 
Michelet, later Mickle; Jourdan, Santee, from 
Burgundy ; Boileau, Balliet, from Languedoc ; 
while in Lancaster County among the early set- 
tlers were French traders, Bezillion, Chartiers, 
Lebort, Perrines, Mathiots, Le Roys, De Bos, 
as well as many later comers. 

The records of the churches of all the many 
sects settled in Pennsylvania are full of names 
showing the French origin of many of the 
members. The Le Beaus are now Lebos, the 
Besores are Bashore and Baysore, according to 
the county they lived in, Berks or Franklin. 
In Lebanon the Jacques became Jacobs ; in 
Dauphin, De Saussier became Sausser; Monier 
from Lorraine, Money; Grosjean, Groshong; 
and Souplis, Suplee. Across the Susquehanna 
in York were Perots, who became Berrot ; Dou- 

tel, Dutill ; Votturin of Lorraine, Woodring ; 
60 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

Moreau, Morrow; St. Gris, Sangree ; La Mothe, 
Lamott ; and the Cessnas and Piatts are among 
the descendants of French Huguenot settlers. 
In Western Pennsylvania are Cassatts (orig- 
inally Cassart), Bonnetts, Marchands, Leis- 
ures, Mestrezats, relatives of Albert Gallatin; 
Brunot; Drey vault, now Dravo; Fortineaux, 
now Fortny ; Boucquet became Buckey ; Mot- 
tier, Motter; and from Pennsylvania through 
Maryland into Virginia these families are 
found. Even of the poor Acadian exiles some 
were left in Pennsylvania, and often their 
names were changed out of all resemblance to 
the French originals, just as the Custom House 
officers wrote the names of immigrants on the 
lists printed in the Pennsylvania Archives, in 
a way that makes it very puzzling to identify 
now. More to be proud of than noble ancestry, 
are the names of such men as Audubon, Bay- 
ard, Benezet, Dupont, Duponceau, Gallaudet, 
Gallatin, and others of French birth or descent, 
who have served their country with honor. 

An early French settlement on the upper 
Delaware in Pennsylvania was that of Nicholas 
Dupuy, in 1725, and a deed for three thousand 

61 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

acres from the Indians in 1727 was confirmed 
by a patent from the Proprietors, the Penns, 
and their grantee, William Allen. Another 
early French settlement in that neighborhood 
was that of the La Barre, Le Barre, or La Bar 
family, in 1730. This name is still honorably 
preserved and distinguished by descendants. 

In 1794 Francois Vannier of St. Domingo 
bought land in Monroe County, Pennsylvania. 
In 1816 Constantine Pinchot of Bretielle, 
France, settled with his son Cyrille on a tract of 
four hundred acres near Milford, Pike County, 
Pennsylvania, still known locally as the French 
lot. His descendants still own the land, and 
have shown a capital example of the success of 
French thrift and intelligence. One of the de- 
scendants is the head of the Forestry Bureau 
of the United States, and has by word and deed 
done an infinite service by his skill and intelli- 
gence in the cause of preserving and restoring 
the wealth of American timber. 

Fauchere, Le Clerck, Bournique, Loreaux, 
are among the names of later French settlers 
on the upper Delaware, and some of the de- 
scendants still live and prosper there. In the 
62 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

western part of Pennsylvania, once a French 
territory, there are still traces of the early 
French settlements, both in place names, such 
as Fort Du Quesne in Pittsburg, and in the 
names of descendants of those whose nation- 
ality was transferred from France to Great 
Britain and then to the United States. 



^£W w&^ ^o^ ^o^ ^o^ 



IV 

French Soldiers in the United States 

Many of the French soldiers who served in 
the American Revolution returned to France 
and left more or less interesting memoirs. The 
Swedish Count Fersen tried to save Marie 
Antoinette, and in his old age lost his life in 
an outbreak in Stockholm. The Marquis 
Armand de la Rouarie, who as Colonel Armand, 
led a cavalry regiment under Washington, be- 
came a noted chief of the loyalists in Brittany, 
and his romantic story is told with great fulness 
of detail in recent books. Others became very 
noted French generals and statesmen. Many 
of the French officers who served with Rocham- 
beau have left notes of the impression made on 
them by Washington. " He has," says Fersen, 
" the air of a hero, his figure fine and majestic, 
his manner gentle and kindly, his smile agree- 
able, his welcome simple and dignified." Segur 

says : " He inspired, rather than commanded, 
64 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

respect;" Lauzun has only praise for his mod- 
eration, and Lafayette entrusted his son to him 
as to a second father. The Rochambeaus, 
father and son, handed down as heirlooms the 
portrait of Washington that he had presented, 
and the guns taken at Yorktown which he gave 
them as trophies, and the sword he had ex- 
changed with the older soldier. Of the French 
officers who served in America, Lauzun, Due de 
Gontaut Biron, served France in its wars only 
to end his life on the scaifold. Berthier became 
Prince of Wagram, Dumas a general under 
Napoleon. 

Chastellux not only served with distinction 
under Rochambeau, but his " Travels in 1780- 
82 " furnish the first really trustworthy record 
of life in the United States, as jotted down by 
a cultivated European, who had helped them to 
gain their independence, and thus he rendered 
a twofold service. 

Even " Tom " Paine brought with him to 
this country his Paris host, Bonneville, and his 
family, and one of the sons became an officer 
of distinction in the United States army. 
Washington Irving wrote an account of Bonne- 
5 65 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

ville's Western explorations. In doing this he 
paid tribute to John Jacob Astor, whose purse 
contributed very largely to the expense of this 
and other early Western explorations, and even 
if he did it with a view to later commercial 
dealings, both gift, and motive did him credit. 
Colonel Bonneville was not the first of the name 
to do good service in America. An earlier De 
Bonneville served as an engineer in the old 
French War in 1763, and published in 1771 a 
book on America. The younger Bonneville, 
born in France in 1795, was appointed to West 
Point, graduated in 1815, and in 1831-3 was 
engaged in explorations in the Rocky Moun- 
tains and California. His journal, edited and 
amplified by Washington Irving, was published 
in 1837. He was brevetted for gallantry in 
the Mexican War, and later for long and faith- 
ful services through the Civil War ; he was the 
oldest officer on the retired list at the time of 
his death. Washington Irving met him at Mr. 
Astor's, through whose generous help both 
profited, and Irving edited Ins manuscript 
notes, and published his Travels to the Rocky 
Mountains, in Philadelphia, through Carey, 
66 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

Lea and Blanchard, in 1837, as in some sort a 
supplement to his Astoria, in which he gave 
an account of Astor's unsuccessful efforts to 
establish trade with Oregon and the then un- 
known West. 

The Comte de Paris and the Prince de 
Joinville not only showed their earnest sym- 
pathy for the Union by brief service in arms 
for it, but the former made a real contribution 
to militar}' history by that of the Civil War, 
and the latter contributed a short account of 
the Army of the Potomac from actual personal 
observation. On both sides in the great 
struggle there were French soldiers, in some 
cases whole regiments from New York and 
companies from New Orleans and Louisiana, 
and all gave a good proof that the old Gallic 
spirit had endured even in their new homes and 
in spite of years of peace and harmony. 

The Society of the Cincinnati in both the 
United States and in France keeps alive the 
memories of the alliance between France and 
the United States, and the successful issue of 
the long struggle for independence. But apart 
from these historic events, there were many 
67 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

Frenchmen to whom the United States is in- 
debted. L'Enfant laid out the city of Wash- 
ington in a way that commands to-day the 
admiration of American architects, and it is 
by restoring his plans that the National Capi- 
tal is to take its place among the great cities 
of the world. 

Balch's " The French in America " gives as 
among the French officers who returned to this 
country to settle, De la Gardette, of the regi- 
ment Soissonais ; De Beaulieu, of the Armand 
Legion, settled at Asylum; Colombe returned 
to Philadelphia after being imprisoned with 
Lafayette at Olmiitz ; Dupetit Thouars, in 
1795-96 at Asylum, fell at the Battle of the 
Nile; Duponceau became a leader of the 
Philadelphia Bar; Duportail came to the 
United States in 1794, and died at sea while 
returning to France in 1804* ; L'Enfant, 
architect, who laid out Washington, died in 
Maryland in 1825. 

Vicomte de Noailles [Louis Marie] was born 
in Paris in 1756, second son of the Marshal 
de Noailles, married his cousin Louise, daugh- 
ter of the Due de Noailles, and granddaughter 
68 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

of D'Aguessau. He was young, handsome, am- 
bitious of glory, a patriot. Returning to the 
United States, he was active in forwarding, 
with Dupetit Thouars, the colony of Asylum 
in Pennsylvania. Returning to active service, 
he was wounded in a successful naval engage- 
ment, and died in Havana January 3, 1804. 
His grandson was one of the French descend- 
ants of the French who served in the American 
Revolution, to visit this country on the Cen- 
tenary of Yorktown. 

Major L'Enfant, author of the plan of the 
City of Washington, D. C, has been properly 
described as a neglected genius. Fortunately 
the wheel of fortune has recently turned in his 
favor, and the great architects of our own day 
have paid tribute to his memory by adopting 
his plans as the basis for the improvements now 
under way, to make Washington a metropolis 
worthy of the nation and suitable for its 
capital. Born in Paris in 1754, he came to 
America in 1777, with Du Coudray, the French 
engineer, served as a volunteer, was commis- 
sioned a captain of engineers in the United 

States army, was attached to the light infantry 
69 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

in the Army of the South, led the advance in 
the assault on Savannah under Lincoln, and 
was wounded at the head of his force; was 
made prisoner at the siege of Charleston, South 
Carolina, and later was exchanged for Captain 
v. Hey den of the Anspach Yagers, and served 
as engineer under Washington. He received 
a pension from the King of France and a brevet 
as major from Congress. He remodelled the 
City Hall in New York for the use of Congress, 
and in acknowledgment received the thanks of 
the corporation, the freedom of the city, and a 
grant of ten acres of city land, which he de- 
clined. In 1789 he wrote to Washington of 
the importance of a plan for the city of Wash- 
ington worthy of the nation, and of the protec- 
tion of the seacoast as a matter of national im- 
portance. He was appointed to prepare the 
plans for the city of Washington, and although 
for many years their execution was postponed 
and marred by the interference of less compe- 
tent hands, they have recently been revived 
and are now being used, with due recognition, 
as the basis for a great and beautiful metro- 
politan capital. He died in 1825 in Prince 
70 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

George's County, Maryland, just beyond the 
line of the District of Columbia. To his archi- 
tectural genius and engineering skill the United 
States owe the plan submitted by L'Enfant in 
1791, and adopted by Congress and approved 
by Washington, and with its execution now his 
fame will be perpetuated in the city of Wash- 
ington. 

In October, 1778, D'Estaing issued in the 
name of Louis XVI a proclamation to all the 
" old French " in North America, inviting 
them to escape the tyranny of Great Britain 
and join the French forces in their help to 
secure liberty for all Americans. 

The French officers by turns paid their re- 
spect to Washington. Chastellux, Noailles, 
Damas, and others were presented by Lafay- 
ette with Laval, Custine, the Deux Ponts broth- 
ers, Charlus, Saint Maime, La Corbiere, and 
Washington received them with great hearti- 
ness, and spoke to and of them in high praise — 
called Duplessis his old acquaintance. 

The Vicomte de Noailles in his " Marins et 

Soldats Francais en Amerique pendant la 

Guerre de l'Independance des Etats Unis, 1778- 
71 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

1783" (Paris, 1903), emphasizes the hearty 
welcome given to the French army in Phila- 
delphia on its way to Yorktown, and later the 
unity between the French engineers in that 
force and those in the American army, in their 
operations that helped so greatly to the sur- 
render of Cornwallis. Du Portail, Du Gouvion, 
and Rochef ontaine were engineers in the army 
under Washington. 

He also gives a letter written about Luzerne, 
the French Minister to the United States, by 
Rochambeau, saying that it was lucky Luzerne 
had joined him, for his house in Philadelphia 
was struck by lightning, his bed, etc., de- 
stro} ;r ed by it, and an artillery officer left there 
on account of illness, killed, — " a great argu- 
ment in favor of Mr. Franklin's Conductors, the 
owner of the house occupied by Luzerne never 
permitting one to be put up, as he was opposed 
to Franklin's plan." 

D'Autichamp, who was made a brigadier for 
his services at Yorktown, was no doubt the 
one who later joined in the French colony at 
Asylum, Pennsj'lvania. Noailles mentions 

among the French officers of the American war, 

72 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

De Laumoy, who served as colonel of engineers 
in the American army, was in Martinique as 
second in command in 1789-91, and came to 
Philadelphia as an exile, remaining there until 
1803; returned to France and was put on the 
retired list in 1811, and died in Paris in 
1832. 

Many of the French officers procured 
employment in the United States. Toussard 
and Bernard in the army, L'Enfant as archi- 
tect and engineer, and others in civil life. One 
of the most ambitious efforts was that made 
by Quesnay de Beaurepaire, to found an 
international Academy of Sciences and Let- 
ters, in Richmond, Virginia. It is fully de- 
scribed by Professor Herbert B. Adams as fol- 
lows : l 

" The United States Academy, at Rich- 
mond, a survival of French influence, was a 
very remarkable attempt made in the latter 
part of the Eighteenth Century to establish 
the higher education in this country upon a 

1 Herbert B. Adams: Thomas Jefferson and the Uni- 
versity of Virginia (United States Bureau of Educa- 
tion, Circular of Information No. 1, 1888). 
73 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

grand scale. It was an attempt, growing out 
of the French alliance with the United States, 
to plant in Richmond, the new capital of Vir- 
ginia, a kind of French Academy of the Arts 
and Sciences, with branch academies in Balti- 
more, Philadelphia, and New York. The in- 
stitution was to be at once national and inter- 
national. It was to be affiliated with the royal 
societies of London, Paris, and Brussels, and 
with other learned bodies in Europe. It was 
to be composed of a president, vice-president, 
six counsellors, a treasurer-general, a secretary, 
a recorder, an agent for taking European sub- 
scriptions, French professors, masters, artists 
in chief attached to the academy, twenty-five 
resident and one hundred and seventy-five non- 
resident associates, selected from the best talent 
of the Old World and the New. The Academy 
proposed to publish yearly from its own press 
in Paris an annual report, to communicate to 
France and other countries in Europe a knowl- 
edge of the natural products of North America, 
and to send specimens of its flora and fauna 
abroad. Experts from Paris were to be the 

teachers. The projector was the Chevalier 

74 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

Quesnay de Beaurepaire, grandson of the great 
economist, Quesnay. He came to this country 
to aid in the Revolution, and served as captain 
in Virginia in 1777-78; he raised sixty thou- 
sand francs and had one hundred subscribers. 
Their names were printed in a pamphlet issued 
in Paris in 1788, showing that he had support 
in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Trenton, Elizabeth, 
Newark, and New York, and from Steuben and 
other worthies. Franklin's daughter, Mrs. 
Bache, wrote to him asking his support to this 
scheme * for the education of young men after 
they have graduated from college.' The cor- 
nerstone was laid in Richmond June 24, 1786, 
in the presence of local authorities and of a 
number of French supporters — Raguet, 
Audrin, La Case, Omphery, Noel, Dossiere, 
Bartholomy, Cureau, and Duval. He returned 
to Paris, secured a favorable report of a com- 
mission of the Academy of Science consisting 
of La Lande, Thouin, and Lavoisier, certi- 
fied by Condorcet, and of the Academy of 
Painting, signed by Vernet and others. He 
enlisted the interest of Beaumarchais, La Fay- 
ette, Houdon, Malesherbes, Lavoisier, Luzerne, 
75 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

Montalembert, and Rochefoucauld in Paris, 
and in London of Bancroft, Paine, Dr. Richard 
Price, Jonathan Trumbull, Rutledge, Benja- 
min West, and Jefferson. Quesnay's plan in- 
cluded schools for foreign languages, mathe- 
matics, design, architecture, painting, sculpt- 
ure, engraving, physics, astronomy, geog- 
raphy, chemistry, mineralogy, botany, anat- 
omy and natural history. The building was 
completed, and later became a theatre, and was 
used for the meeting of the Virginia Conven- 
tion which, in 1788, ratified the Constitution of 
the United States. One professor was ap- 
pointed, Dr. John Rouelle, to be mineralogist- 
in-chief and Professor of Natural History, 
Chemistry, and Botany, but it is doubtful if he 
ever came to this country. The French Revo- 
lution put a stop to the plan, and all that is 
known of it is from the rare copies of Quesnay's 
Memoir." 

" A French Volunteer in the War of Inde- 
pendence " is the story of the Chevalier de 
Pontgibaud (translated by R. B. Douglass, 
published by Carrington, Paris, 1897). He 

was one of the many French soldiers who had 
76 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

served under Rochambeau, and in his three 
visits to this country had abundant opportunity 
to contrast the people and the country. He 
speaks of the colony at Asylum in Pennsyl- 
vania, founded mainly by De Noailles, for both 
in France and in the United States it attracted 
much attention, and the story of the emigrant 
settlers, and their hardships, was the subject 
of a great deal of discussion. He says that in 
1793 six hundred French refugees from St. 
Domingo arrived in Philadelphia at the time 
of a severe outbreak of yellow fever. The 
French Patriotic Society contributed eight 
hundred dollars and a fund of eleven thousand 
dollars was raised for their relief. He men- 
tions, too, the arrival in 1798 of a large num- 
ber of French refugees with many negroes 
from Port au Prince in Philadelphia, and the 
effort of General Toussard, then in command 
of Fort Mifflin, near the city, to relieve their 
distress. Later on he reports that eight vessels 
brought two hundred and twenty-seven French 
refugees. 



V 

Early French Travellers in the 
United States 

Chateaubriand came to the United States 
in 1791 with a letter to Washington from 
the Marquis de la Rouarie, who as Colonel 
Armand had borne a creditable part in the 
American War of Independence. At that time 
there was an increasing emigration from 
France to escape the growing violence of the 
French Revolution. On the shores of the Ohio 
an as} r lum was opened in the land of liberty to 
those who fled from its excesses. Landing in 
Baltimore, he went to Philadelphia, where he 
found many exiles from France and St. 
Domingo. Chateaubriand, in republication of 
his works in his old age, notes the French place 
names, dwelt on the county of Bourbon with 
its county-seat Paris, in Kentucky, and the town 
of Versailles in that State, and the county of 

Marengo in Alabama. He quotes Pere du 

78 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

Creux, a Jesuit writer, as authority for the 
fact that a French colony was established in 
Onondaga, New York, in 1655, and Charle- 
voix as mentioning that the missionaries sent 
there in 1654 established a French colony in 
1658, which was abandoned in 1668, — but 
these are both doubtful. 

Chateaubriand spent only a few months in 
the United States, but he drew from earlier 
writers, such as the Abbe Raynal, and from 
earlier travellers, Bartram and others, much of 
the material for his novels, poems, historical 
essays, etc. His stay in Baltimore, Philadel- 
phia, New York, and Albany, seems to have 
left little trace among their usually hospitable 
citizens. In Baltimore the Sulpicians have a 
tradition from one of their order who was his 
fellow passenger from France, that Chateau- 
briand tried to convert some of his young men 
to the liberalism then fashionable. In Phila- 
delphia he presented his letter from Colonel 
Armand, of the American Army, but later 
known as Marquis de la Rouarie, leader of the 
Bretons in their counter-revolution for the 
Royalists, and after some delay, owing to 
79 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

Washington's absence in the South, was re- 
ceived. He says that Washington was very 
incredulous as to the discovery of a northwest 
passage, the ostensible object of his visit to 
America, but Chateaubriand said : " It is an 
easier task than to create a nation, and that 
you have done." Washington invited him to 
dinner and he accepted. He compares Wash- 
ington and Bonaparte, much to the advantage 
of the great American, who left the United 
States as the trophy won by him in battle, while 
Bonaparte deprived his country of liberty and 
betrayed it, and dying left a name without 
blessing. " Washington," he writes, " was the 
representative of the needs, the ideas, the in- 
telligence, the opinions of his time ; he advanced 
the movement of its best intellects ; he sacrificed 
everything for his country ; his glory is the 
common patrimony of growing civilization, his 
fame a sanctuary whence flow endless blessings 
for the world." 

Chateaubriand had seen both Washington 

and Bonaparte, and as he suffered at the hands 

of the latter for his opposition, was naturally 

inclined to find in Washington a much purer, 

80 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

better and higher type of heroism. Much of 
his recollection of his short journey in the 
United States is in his Historical Essays. He 
made a pilgrimage to Lexington, the first bat- 
tle-ground of the American Revolution, and 
he describes his visit to Niagara with more 
poetry than fact. On his way from Albany 
through the solitary forests, he found a French- 
man, once cook for Rochambeau, teaching the 
savage Indians to dance — they half naked, with 
rings in their noses, feathers in their hair; he 
powdered, in full dress, fiddle in hand, and tak- 
ing his pay in poultry and bear meat. What 
he saw of Niagara is described in his novel, 
Atala, but his Travels to the South are largely 
drawn from Bartram's and other books. Re- 
turned to Philadelphia, he heard of the execu- 
tion of the king, and at once returned to France 
and then to England, where he began the long 
series of books on American subjects that gave 
him fame. 

More of a poet and a romancer than a 
serious statesman or a man of letters, he has 
said little that shows how he was impressed 

by his short stay in America. He was in 

6 81 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

Baltimore and Philadelphia at a time when 
many of his countrymen found refuge there, 
but he seems to have been but little with them. 
His companions on Ins travels were Hollanders, 
representatives of the large land-owners of that 
country. While the Philosophical Society and 
the Binghams in Philadelphia were opening 
their doors to the French exiles of all political 
opinions — Noailles, Omer Talon, Talleyrand, 
Volney, Brissot de Warville, Moreau, and many 
others are of record in one way or another — 
there is no mention of Chateaubriand, whose 
fame was to exceed that of all our other French 
visitors. 

" A Sketch of the United States from 1800 
to 1810/' by Chevalier Felix de Beaujour, at 
one time consul general of France in the United 
States, was not allowed to be published in 
France, on the score of its favorable tone 
towards Great Britain, but in 1811 a transla- 
tion was published in London, with notes, etc., 
by William Walton. The editor said the 
author's aim was to take from Great Britain 
its trade with the United States, and the notes 
are intended to correct his hostilitv to the 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

English system of trade, so soon to lead to war 
with the United States. 

General Victor Collot had served with 
Rochambeau in the American War of Inde- 
pendence, later became governor of Guade- 
loupe, until its capture by the English, then 
came to Philadelphia, and with his adjutant, 
Warin, by authority of Adet, the French Min- 
ister to the United States, under an order dated 
" Phila. 24th ventose, 4th Year of the Repub- 
lic One and Indivisible," made a long tour 
through North America, of which the account 
was not published until 1826, long after the 
death of the travellers. 

Collot speaks of the few memorials of Jesuits 
or other missionaries, written " more than sixty 
years since " (his own journey began in 1796), 
as the only monuments which France can pro- 
duce of its labors and researches in North 
America. His journey took him through 
Pennsylvania to the Monongahela and Ohio. 
Pittsburg he found a town of one hundred and 
fifty houses. Thence he started in his own 
boat, purchased at McKee6port, with two 
Canadians and three Americans, for New 
83 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

Orleans, and he gives a minute record of his 
daily observations. In Marietta he found a 
few French families, unfortunate victims of 
American land speculation on the part of the 
Scioto Company. He blames the French for 
their folly in trying to establish a colony with- 
out using the least precaution to safeguard 
their ownership, but he condemns unqualifiedly 
the managers who abandoned the poor settlers. 
At Gallipolis there was a population reckoned 
at ninety to ninety-five men, and forty to forty- 
five women, the wreck of the Scioto community. 
Congress granted seven acres to each family, 
not sufficient for their maintenance, and there- 
fore they were extremely miserable; the site 
unhealthy, the land bad, the houses small log 
huts, flanked by three block-houses, the whole 
palisaded with great picquets, the place dirty 
and the abode of wretchedness. Congress, in 
1796, voted each family two hundred and fifty 
acres of land near the Little Scioto, as indem- 
nity for the suffering, robbery, and murder of 
which they had been the victims, through the 
carelessness, perfidy, and knavery of the agents 
of the Land Company which had brought them 

here. 

84 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

At Louisville he found a suburb laid out by 
a French settler; at St. Vincent's, a small 
village of one hundred families, the greater 
part French, ruined by General Clark during 
the last war, as were also the settlements in Illi- 
nois. Another small French establishment was 
Onia or Oniatenon, a trading point for furs. 
On the Mississippi there were French settle- 
ments on both banks of the river. At St. Louis 
the two hundred French were excellent patri- 
ots, all devoted to France, laborers in easy cir- 
cumstances, and prosperous merchants, and in 
other places near at hand were considerable 
settlements of French. 



VI 

French Exiles in the United States 

The records of the Roman Catholic Church 
form an important share in the historical col- 
lections of that body. 

The American Catholic Historical Societ} r 
has printed in its Proceedings, the registers 
of the churches in Philadelphia, St. Mary's 
and St. Joseph's ; in them are the births, mar- 
riages, and deaths of many French families, 
refugees from St. Domingo and other West 
Indian French colonies at their sanguinary 
revolutions. Father Cibot, who made some of 
these entries, was himself one of the exiles from 
St. Domingo. Among the names on these 
registers are those of De Serres, Drouillard, 
Langlade, Gobert, Balestrier, St. Didier, Petit, 
Bauduy, Roseau, Des Cloches, Chaudron, De la 
Lande-Ormund (in this case the husband came 
from Brittany, the wife from Pondicherry). 
This colony of French exiles was long one of 
86 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

the characteristic features of Philadelphia. 
Gathered together on Front Street and out 
Spruce and Pine as far as Eighth Street, there 
were the homes of merchants, doctors, lawyers, 
and men of letters. 

For years the schools kept by Frenchmen 
and women, — Picots, Guillous, Segoignes, Bol- 
mars, Grellots — were the best in the country. 
In 1793 the French Benevolent Society was 
organized, and on its list of members were the 
names of De 1'Isle, Duval, Clapier, Laval, 
Bujac, De la Roche, Gardette, Droz, Brugiere, 
Monges, Garesche, Dabadie, Maillard, Pintard, 
Crousillat, Rodrigues, Dutilh, Dcschapelles, 
Mazurie, Breuil, Prevost, Besson, Belin, Trou- 
bat, Rousseau, Mathieu, Salignac, Laussatt, 
and later on such names as Duponceau, Girard, 
Thouron, Turreau, Rozet, Vauclain, Laval, 
Vanuxem. From that day to this the list at- 
tests the presence in Philadelphia of French 
families proud of the history of this useful 
organization and still continuing its useful and 
modest career of benevolence. A sad record 
of these exiles is found in the monuments in 
St. Mary's Roman Catholic graveyard, to the 
87 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

Melizets. the Laussats, the Lcjambres, the 
Bouviers, the Bories, the Keatings, the Tes- 
sieres, and others. 

In " Reminiscences of Wilmington, Dela- 
ware" by E. Montgomery, ( Philadelphia, 
1851), there is mention of many French exiles 
settled there; M. Martel, the tutor of Aaron 
Burr's daughter, and Dr. Bayard and Dr. 
Capelle, who had served under Lafayette in the 
Revolution : I. Isambrie, a soldier under Na- 
poleon until his return from Egypt, with his 
wife, a native of St. Domingo. — he took Mar- 
shal Grouchy and General Moreau out on shoot- 
ing excursions ; Ferdin and Baudry ; la Mar- 
quise de Sourci ; Dr. Didie. the Garesehe 
family, Feter Provenchere. a tutor of the Due 
de Berri. and his relative the wife of John 
Keating of Philadelphia : Mrs. Capron, who 
kept a successful school : M. Bergerac, a 
teacher, later a professor in St. Mary's College. 
Baltimore: M. Sarsney : and with these exiles, 
came many colored people, who were respected 
for good qualities. Thus in Wilmington, Dela- 
ware, too. the later French exiles found shelter, 
and many of them employment with the Du- 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

ponts and Garesches and Lammots in their 
large and important industries. Among the 
French settlers in Philadelphia was John 
Bouvier, who came in 1802, at fifteen years of 
age, with his family, from the south of France. 
Quakers, they were warmly welcomed ; the 
father died of yellow fever, the son became a 
printer and later a lawyer, and is well known 
by his " Institutes," his Law Dictionary and 
other works. 

As early as 1803 a colony of French Trap- 
pists arrived in Baltimore, and soon made a 
home in Adams County, Pennsylvania; thence 
going to near Louisville, and making settle- 
ments in Kentucky. Among the Roman 
Catholic clergy were many Frenchmen, among 
them Archbishop Cheverus of Bordeaux, who 
was for many years Bishop of Boston, Massa- 
chusetts. He kept in touch with his old 
parishioners down to the end of his long and 
honored life, and he was but one of many 
French priests in the United States. 

Among the noteworthy early French priests 
was the Rev. Louis Barth de Walbach, of Al- 
sace. Born at Munster in 1764, he arrived in 
89 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

Baltimore in 1791, and after long years of 
active service in the ministry of his church, he 
and his brother, General John de Walbach, a 
veteran of the American War of Independence, 
quietly lived in Georgetown College, District of 
Columbia, where the former died in 184;-i, the 
latter in Baltimore, in 1857. 



VII 

French Settlers and Exiles in South 
Carolina l 

The Huguenot emigrants, who arrived in 
Charleston, South Carolina, 1680-86, began 
their French Church about 1687 on land given 
by Ralph Izard; Isaac Mazyck, one of the 
earliest and wealthiest of his race, gave gener- 
ously to its erection and support. 

The prosperity of the Huguenots aroused 
the j ealousy of their neighbors ; many of the 
refugees being possessed of considerable prop- 
erty in France, had sold it and brought the 
money to England. Having purchased large 
tracts of land with this money, they settled 
in more advantageous circumstances than the 
poorer sort of the English emigrants. Hav- 
ing clergymen of their own persuasion, for 
whom they entertained the highest respect and 

•"Charleston: The Place and the People," by Mrs. 
St. Julien Ravenel. New York. Macmillan, 1906. 
91 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

admiration, they were disposed to encourage 
them as far as their narrow circumstances would 
permit. The two pastors who accompanied 
them were the Reverend Elias Prioleau, of the 
Church of Pons in Saintonge, whose grand- 
father, a member of the ducal house of Priuli, 
had surrendered rank and fortune for the 
Protestant faith sixty years before ; and the 
Reverend Florente Philippe Trouillard. Prio- 
leau was dead (his monument may be seen in 
the French Protestant Church of Charleston), 
but M. Trouillard and his " ancien " or elder, 
M. Boutelle, petitioned the Proprietors on the 
injustice done to their people. The Proprietors 
in answer, ordered that the French have equal 
justice with Englishmen and enjoy the same 
privileges. In 1697 an act was passed making 
aliens free of this part of the province and 
granting liberty of conscience to all Protes- 
tants, with a preamble acknowledging their 
loyalty and industry. When in 1706 the 
Huguenots outside of the town cast in their lot 
with the Episcopal Church, those of Charleston, 
having a church with ample endowments, kept 
and preserve to this day their own independent 
92 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

organization. In 1736 the Huguenots estab- 
lished in a small way the South Carolina Club, 
still in active life, which besides assisting in- 
digent widows and orphans, established a school 
for boys and girls. 

In the Revolutionary War, the Huguenots 
furnished such soldiers as Motte, grandson of 
the first immigrant of that name; Marion, 
Huger, Robert, and many others. In 1792 
the French refugees from St. Domingo found 
shelter in New Orleans and Charleston, where 
they were received with kindness and sympathy. 
The townsfolk threw open their houses to re- 
ceive the fugitives. Nothing could exceed their 
courage and cheerfulness. Uncomplaining, 
gay, and pathetically grateful, they won the 
esteem and respect of their hosts. No one had 
cause to repent his hospitality. For their 
assistance the city gave $12,500, besides the 
proceeds of a concert and many gifts, and the 
United States government appropriated $1750. 
This help enabled many of them to begin some 
occupation ; they would take no more than was 
absolutely necessary, and quickly bestirred 

themselves for their own support. They were 
93 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

accomplished in music, painting, and the lan- 
guages, and pupils were soon found. Some of 
the gentlemen were good musicians and entered 
the orchestra of the theatre, which greatly 
benefited by their skill. Thirteen of the best 
teachers in town were refugees. Two of the 
schools established by them were long the most 
fashionable. In an inferior class, the best 
bakers, pastrycooks, dressmakers, hairdressers, 
and clearstarchers, were refugees or their chil- 
dren, and they were the best dancing-teachers, 
too. A few who had some knowledge of busi- 
ness became successful merchants, and more 
than one was distinguished in medicine. One 
of these, Dr. Polony, was the most eminent, 
being a member of learned European societies 
and a correspondent of Buffon. Seven 3 r ears 
after their arrival, the Due de la Rochefoucauld 
Liancourt visited Charleston, and in his Travels 
speaks warmly of the gentleness, courtesy and 
agreeability of these refugees, and the untiring 
kindness and liberality of the citizens, who were 
well rewarded by the example of good manners 
and accomplishments which embellished society. 

The mother of Joseph Jefferson was one of 
94 






IN THE UNITED STATES 

these refugees, and the great actor told the 
story of her life and its many vicissitudes in 
his autobiography. 

In the churchyard of the Roman Catholic 
Church are many graves of St. Domingan 
refugees, among them those of the daughters 
of Count de Grasse, the commander of the 
French auxiliary fleet during the Revolution. 

In 1825 Lafayette visited Charleston, and 
was greeted by Colonel Huger, who had risked 
his life in a vain effort to rescue him from 
prison. He renewed his acquaintance with the 
survivors of his campaigns in the Revolution, 
with General Pinckney, and the daughter of 
General Greene, and the widow of Colonel 
Washington. Later his nephew De Lasteyrie 
visited Charleston and married a Charleston 
girl, Lafayette Seabrook, named in honor of 
his uncle's visit to her parents in 1825. In 
the midst of the excitement of nullification in 
1833, a subscription ball was given under the 
patronage of Count de Choiseul, for " poor old 
M. Fayolle, who had lost his all in a ship- 
wreck," an old St. Domingan refugee, who had 

taught half Charleston to dance. Choiseul was 
95 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

for many } r ears French consul at Charleston ; 
a royalist, his eldest son fell fighting gallantly 
as captain of the Louisiana Zouaves in the Civil 
War, and the second son became Marquis de 
Choiseul. 






VIII 

French Settlements in the West 
and in Canada 

" Oeigine et Progres de la Mission du Ken- 
tucky " (Paris, 1821), is a pamphlet giving 
an encouraging account of the French settled 
in that State. Twenty-four Catholic families 
came to Kentucky in 1785 from Maryland; 
their number increased, and in 1793 Bishop Car- 
roll of Baltimore sent M. Badin, of Orleans, 
who for many years had spiritual charge of the 
Catholics in Kentucky, while M. Rivet of 
Limoges came in 1795 as vicar general to 
Vincennes, on the Wabash, in Indiana. In 
1797 and 1799 Messrs. Fournier and Salmon 
of Blois, followed by a number of French 
priests exiled from France by the Revolution, 
came to Kentucky. M. Olivier of Nantes set- 
tled at Prairie du Rocher, Illinois, and served 
there and at Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Saint Louis, 
Ste. Genevieve, etc. In 1808 an episcopate wa3 
7 97 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

established at Bardstown, Kentucky, where 
later French Trappists established a convent 
with a branch at Cahokia, in which many 
Indians were educated. At Gallipolis, in Ohio, 
whore in 1791 there was a colony of French 
people, victims of a miserable speculation, who 
had mostly abandoned the place. Messrs. 
Barrieres and Badin baptized forty children in 
1793, and the whole village was inspired by the 
service. 

The popularity of the French is attested by 
the names. Bourbon County and Paris, Ver- 
sailles, Louisville, in Kentucky. There were 
five Frenchmen bishops, — M. Marechal of 
Orleans, in Baltimore ; M. Cheverus of Paris, 
in Boston ; M. Flaget of Auvergne, in Ken- 
tucky ; M. David of Nantes, his coadjutor; M. 
Dubourg of St. Louis, Bishop of Louisiana and 
Florida. M. Flaget came to America in 1792 
with Messrs. David and Badin. At Bardstown 
many important schools were under the 
care of French priests. An appeal was made 
to the people of France to help them with 
money, books, church ornaments, etc. It would 
be interesting to know how far it was answered. 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

Drovine's " Lcs Royalistes Francais refugies 
au Canada " (Quebec, 1905), gives many facts 
of interest. In 1793 Abbe Desjardins recalled 
from Gallipolis Dom Didier, a Benedictine, 
from the Abbey of St. Denis. He says : Galli- 
polis was founded in 1790 on the banks of the 
Ohio. In 1796 the colony numbered about 
eighty, and in 1805 this was reduced to twenty. 
Asylum, on the Susquehanna, was founded in 
1794 by Messrs. Noailles and Talon ; it began 
with thirty houses, and included among its 
number, M. Blacons, deputy to the constituent 
assembly ; Bee de Lievre, canon ; Archdeacon 
Toul ; Abbe Fromentin, Abbe Charles, M. d'An- 
dclot of the French infantry; Du Petit Thou- 
ars, officer of the navy ; Brcvost of Paris ; Mine. 
d'Autrepont. These settlers became farmers 
and made potash, sugar, molasses, and vinegar. 
Many priests came to Canada, and Drovine 
tells their story with great fulness and detail. 
The same ship that brought Chateaubriand to 
Baltimore carried five priests and two semin- 
arists. After a voyage of three months they 
landed and soon established a seminary near 

Baltimore, in 1791 ; later, in 1792, eight more 
99 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

arrived, and in 1793-4-5-6-8, new arrivals 
came, in all twenty-nine, while forty-five went 
to Canada. Of the former six became bishops, 
one an Archbishop and Cardinal, Cheverus of 
Boston, later of Bordeaux. While the clergy 
were helped by large subscriptions and by the 
government, an effort was made to quicken the 
emigration of lay royalists to Canada. Cha- 
teaubriand sa3 T s that in London some sol/d 
coal, others made hats, some taught French. 
Then it was " a proposal for a subscription to 
form Colonies in Canada of French Emigrants, 
Royalists, and ecclesiastics " was published in 
London, and its execution was undertaken by 
Count Joseph de Puisaye, who had been a 
soldier by turns in the Cent Suisses, in the 
National Guard, in the Federal Army, at the 
head of the Chouans in Brittany, where he 
organized a Military Council and issued three 
millions of paper money like the assignats of 
the Republic. He went to London and enlisted 
the help of Pitt, who gave him a command in 
the unsuccessful attack on Quiberon, which 
was repelled by Hoche. Thiers says he had 

great intelligence, a rare talent for organiza- 
100 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

tion, activity of mind and body, and vast ambi- 
tion. He wrote a paper on the establishment 
of a French colony in Canada, and five hundred 
persons applied to join — eight marquises, two 
bishops, one Benedictine monk, two priests, one 
doctor, six counts, one baron, many naval 
officers, seven Chevaliers de St. Louis, a prin- 
cess, a countess, a marquise and a long list of 
other noble personages. Out of thirty-eight 
who actually emigrated few of the people of 
rank really left England. Arrived in Canada in 
October, 1798, Puisaye, strongly recommended 
by the home authorities, was allowed five thou- 
sand acres, and land was set apart on and near 
Lake Ontario for the settlers and a town and 
farms. Puisaye was made a justice of the 
peace and commandant of a corps with one 
major commanding, two captains, two lieu- 
tenants, four sub-lieutenants, one adjutant, one 
quartermaster, one chaplain, one surgeon and 
an assistant, six sergeants, eight corporals, and 
one hundred and fifty soldiers. The land, 
over four thousand acres, was distributed 
among the settlers, but of the forty, only 

twenty-five remained. Puisaye himself soon 
101 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

went back to England, and others followed, so 

that the colony was practically abandoned. 
Later a mysterious person settled near Trois 
Rivieres, who it is supposed was the Due de 
Vicence, Caulaincourt. one of Napoleon's gen- 
erals : he came in 1S16 and left in 1850. but the 
mystery of his identity was never really solved. 
Most of the clergymen remained and many 
were useful parish priests, some teachers, others 
high dignitaries of their church. 



IX 

Brillat Savarin in the United States 

Brillat Savarin came as an exile from the 
French Revolution in 1793, and resided three 
years in New York, where he taught French 
and played in the orchestra of a theatre, re- 
turning to France in 1796, where he filled 
important posts, and died in 1826. 

In his " Physiologie du Gout " he says that 
in Boston he found Julien keeping a restau- 
rant — he had been cook for the Archbishop of 
Bordeaux; Brillat Savarin showed him how to 
cook eggs with cheese, and it was so popular 
that Julien sent him in New York part of a 
young roe deer from Canada. Captain Collet 
made quite a fortune in selling ices and sorbets 
in New York in 1794-95. In New York he 
met the Vcte. de Massue and M. Fehr of 
Marseilles, exiles, too. In Connecticut he dined 
at a farm house near Hartford (in October, 

1794), on corned beef, stewed goose, a haunch 
103 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

of mutton, vegetables in plenty, and two huge 
foaming pots of excellent cider, and later ex- 
cellent tea. They shot next day partridges, 
squirrels, and wild turkeys ; then returned to 
supper, ate like famished men, with an ample 
bowl of punch to crown the entertainment. 
His host, M. Barlow, had served in the War of 
Independence, and spoke in high praise of 
" the Marquis " La Fayette. The daughter 
sang " Yankee Doodle," " Major Andre's 
Lament," and other popular songs. His host 
said in bidding him adieu, that he was a happy 
man — he owned his property, his daughters 
knit his stockings, his shoes and clothes were 
made from his own flocks, which provided his 
food, too; he had no locks on his doors, taxes 
were nominal, Congress favors our rising in- 
dustry, agents visit us to purchase what we 
have to sell — e. g., flour at $24 per ton [s*V], 
the usual price having been $8. The sound of 
the drum is never heard except on the Fourth 
of July, and only on that day soldiers are seen. 
During his ride home, Savarin was think- 
ing how to cook his turkey, and he gave a 

dinner at Hartford to his American friends, 
10-t 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

with the wings of the partridges " en papillote," 
the gray squirrels stewed in Madeira, while 
the roast turkey was pleasing to the eye, flat- 
tering to the smell and delicious to the taste; 
and when the last particle had vanished, there 
was a universal murmur of applause. 

His friend shot wild turkeys in Carolina 
and found them excellent, of much better flavor 
than those reared in Europe. Savarin, 
who was a cousin of Mme. Recamier, always 
spoke with pleasure of his stay in the United 
States. 



^ro^ 



i™ m^$ ra w&$ fgf 

«^raK© elw eAiSte eArate e»» 



French Land Companies in the 
United States 

Gouverneur Morris was busy with land 
sales abroad, as well as with diplomatic mis- 
sions, and to his great friends, for he was as 
rich in them as in American lands, he was con- 
stantly pointing out the great future for invest- 
ment in them. In 1794 he notes that Le Ray 
de Chaumont had been ahead of him in dealing 
with the Baron de Coppet, Necker. Already 
in 1789 he had broached to his friends in 
France a plan for a settlement on the banks of 
the river St. Lawrence for those who want 
to go out to America. In 1790 he writes to 
Robert Morris that frequent applications were 
made to him for advice about American lands, 
but he felt that it would hardly do for him 
to bear the responsibility of advising French 
citizens to abandon their native country. He 

was therefore anxious that an office should be 
106 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

opened in Paris where maps could be seen and 
titles lodged, adding : " Purchasers here are 
for the most part ignorant of geography. So 
far from thinking the forests a disadvantage, 
they are captivated with the idea of having 
their chateaux surrounded by magnificent trees. 
They naturally expect superb highways over 
the pathless deserts, and see with the mind's 
eye numerous barges in every stream." His 
journey in 1794 to Quebec and Northern New 
York only increased his faith in the great 
future of the then " West," and he described 
his lands there as the finest he ever saw. In 
1808 he wrote to Mme. de Stael: "I shall 
expect to see you with your son next spring. 
I know your friend Le Ray keeps you well in- 
formed about your affairs. If your landed 
property were all lying together it would be 
more valuable, because it could be managed 
with more ease and less expense." Indeed at 
thirty-five, Mme. de Stael was seriously consid- 
ering Morris' urgent recommendation to go to 
the United States as a safe refuge from the 
troubles in Europe. Alike in Paris and in 

Germany, Morris encouraged his friends of all 
107 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

ranks to save their money by putting it into 
American land, and no doubt Le Kay de Chau- 
mont and others who planned French colonies 
in the United States did so with his help. 

The elder Le Kay de Chaumont was owner 
of a luxurious home at Fassy. where in one of 
its dependencies, the Hotel Valentinois. Frank- 
lin found a quiet retreat. Le Kay was 
Grand Master of the Waters and Forests of 
France and Honorary Intendant of the In- 
valides. He was rich and occupied the chateau 
of Chaumont on the Loire, as well as the house 
at Passy. He was the close friend of the Due 
de Choiseul. his neighbor at Chaumont. and 
had declined his invitation to enter the min- 
istry, as he preferred to act as an intermediary 
between the [American] Commissioners and 
Versailles. 1 

J. Donatien Le Kay de Chaumont was the 
son of Franklin*^ host at Fassy. The father 
had advanced large sums to the struggling 
colonies, and the son came over to settle his 
father's accounts. At the suggestion of 
Gouverneur Morris he bought large tracts of 

1 Smyth: Life of Franklin, p. 306. 

ioe 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

land in Northern New York, and at one time 
owned thirty thousand acres in Franklin 
County; seventy-three thousand acres in St. 
Lawrence County ; one hundred and forty -three 
thousand five hundred acres in Jefferson 
County ; one hundred thousand acres in Lewis 
County. In 1815, through Duponceau as 
agent, he conveyed one hundred and fifty thou- 
sand acres to Joseph Bonaparte. The actual 
sale, it is said, was made in France, as Joseph 
was flying from the allies, and he paid down 
in gold and precious stones from the store he 
was carrying off. Joseph was supposed to 
intend to make a refuge for Napoleon, if he 
should escape to the United States. It was 
intended to found large manufacturing estab- 
lishments on the Black River, to injure the 
English industries. The details were discussed 
with a son of Murat, when he was visiting 
Le Ray in his new home. Le Ray built a large 
house at Le Rayville, ten miles east of Water- 
town, and there he entertained many notable 
French visitors. Joseph Bonaparte came in 
1815, and in 1828 built a hunting-lodge, 
where he spent several summers. Tradition 

109 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

reported in county histories (see Sylvesf 
'• Northern New York." Troy. 1877] and 
gh's *' Jefferson C:...:; ." Albany. 1S54) 
that dressed in a green hunting-suit he drove 
in ■ coach and six over roads he had cut 
through the forests, and that on the Black 
River he had a six-" rr.dola. In 1S35 

^d his land to John I rge. of New 

York. Le B n settlements in 1S01 and 

in 1803 laid out the village still called Chau- 
mont. An earlier effort to establish a French 
colony in the wilds of New Y - de by 

French agents of William C the 

partner of M . the owner of over I 

and a half million acres. Heir oomji 
to set apart : sand acres : 

thousand acres for a town on Lake Qui 
six thousand acres for artisans, 
sand acres for reads, bridges, etc. Le Ray's 
purchases ir.cluded part of Oris vast be 
and his plans are described in the Appendix 
- St John de Crevecarar's u Ti U Penn- 
( French ed.. Paris. 1801). Le Ray 
sold tracts to many noted Frenchmen, among 
them C .v.':./. :./:. Real, Grouchy, and De 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

Furneaux, and it is said that among the pur- 
chasers were Mme. de Stael; but at all events 
Le Ray spent years in promoting settlements 
on his lands. His last visit to them was made 
in 1836, and he died in Paris in 1840. 

Donatien Le Ray de Chaumont married a 
Miss Coxe of New Jersey. Their son, Vincent 
Le Ray de Chaumont, published in Paris, in 
1833, a pamphlet, " Renseignemens sur la 
Partie des Etats Unis la plus favorable aux 
Agriculteurs venant d'Europe," in which he 
advises intending French emigrants. He " rec- 
ommends them to buy and settle on his tract 
of three hundred thousand acres in Jefferson 
Count} r , New York, or in the neighborhood, 
for the State of New York sold its lands much 
lower than the United States in order to in- 
crease its population and its representation and 
influence in Congress. It is near sawmills, 
flourmills, etc., and farm products bring much 
better prices than on the Ohio or anywhere 
in the West. The country is favorable for vine- 
yards and silk culture. The father and the son 
are ready to answer any inquiries made of them 

at their house in Paris." An extract from an 
111 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

address by Major Curry before the Jefferson 
County Agricultural Society, gives an account 
of the success of the vines and mulberry trees 
sent by Le Ray. A circular signed by thirty 
or more residents of Rosiere, the name of the 
first settlement, commends it and the adjoining 
lands of M. Le Ray de Chaumont. The signers 
give their French homes, Haute Saone, Vitrey, 
Arbecey, Combeaufontaine, etc., and their 
statement as to the advantages of their new 
home is attested by the curate, by the bishop of 
New York, who had himself visited the new 
colonj-, and by the French consul general. 

In Smyth's Franklin, vol. ix, p. 636, etc., 
Franklin writes to Le Veillard, of the visit of 
Messrs. Picque and Saugrain, the latter a 
brother-in-law of Dr. Guillotin, who had re- 
solved to remove to America, and these two 
went ahead to investigate the country. Frank- 
lin wrote to Guillotin from Philadelphia on 
May 4, 1788, of bad news of an accident to 
them on their way down the Ohio, and again 
on October 23, 1788, confirming the loss of 
" poor M. Pique " in a wilderness country, and 

Guillotin never came. 

112 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

The following books on French colonies in 
the United States are of interest : " Le 
Nouveau Mississippi ou les Dangers d'habiter 
les Bords du Scioto par un patriote Voy- 
ageur " [Sergeant Major Roux], Paris, 1790, 
was written to disabuse the unhappy victims 
of the Scioto speculators. There was estab- 
lished in Paris, rue Neuve des Petits Champs, 
No. 162, a company under the name of Scioto. 
Roux, secretary of the government of Com- 
piegne, who travelled in 1784 through the 
country of the Scioto and the Ohio, said 
" he could have bought for twenty-five louis, 
three or four leagues on the shores of the Ohio, 
with Congress paper money at ninety per cent., 
but it would have been a total loss. He warns 
others that they will lose their money and be 
worse than slaves. He cites a memoir deposited 
in the Bureau of the Navy in 1784. He warns 
his countrymen against the enterprise of the 
Scioto Company. The soil has little depth, 
crops diminish yearly, trees have shallow roots, 
in three years the land must be abandoned. 
The American works but two or three days a 
week, that he may drink or idle the others; 
8 113 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

the labor is done by ' redemptionists,' men 
who pay for their passage by hiring them- 
selves out. All men of talent in America are 
traders. Manufactures can never compete 
with the superior products of Europe. The 
Scioto Society boast of the soil, but say noth- 
ing of the dangers of climate, want of good 
water, of the savages, which will destroy any 
French settlement." 

" Lettres ecrites des rives de l'Ohio, par 
Claude Francois Adrien de Lezay [Marquis 
de] Marnezia, citoyen de Pensylvanie. Au 
Fort Pitt et a Paris, an IX de la Republique." 
Querard says this pamphlet was seized by 
the police and is very rare. First letter 
from "Marieta," [sfc] November 15, 1790: 
" Living in the finest house here, surrounded by 
generals, majors, colonels, chevaliers of the 
Order of the Cincinnati, — that is, lodged in a 
wretched hut, with titled neighbors who drive 
their own teams, cultivate and very badly their 
fields, wear poor clothes, entertaining some 
visiting Indians, who prefer Frenchmen to 
Americans, since the latter can never culti- 
vate the arts." Second letter, Fort Pitt, No- 
114 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

vember 2, 1791 [to Bernardin de St. Pierre] : 
" I came to America to find a safe and peaceful 
retreat from the turmoil of France, to take 
possession of a tract of land on the banks of 
the Ohio, but I found the promises of the 
prospectus of the Scioto Company false in 
every respect, except as to the good soil. That 
Company has utterly failed in its plans. Leav- 
ing New York for my land on the Scioto and 
Ohio, I stopped first at Bethlehem, Pennsyl- 
vania, with the Moravians. [Here follows a 
glowing account of their schools, etc.] The 
best site for a French colony would be at the 
head of the Ohio, between the Aleghain and 
the Monongahela. Let fifty families, part 
nobles, part good citizens, come with their ser- 
vants and farm-hands, mechanics, — in all from 
one thousand to twelve hundred persons ; with 
money enough to buy lands for themselves and 
for those who, approved by a two-thirds vote, 
may join them, the latter paying, of course, 
a proportion of the expenses already incurred. 
Fifteen hundred acres will suffice for a farm 
that will maintain in comfort each family. 

There will be no difficulty in buying land; the 
115 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

Americans are lazy and bored, often moving 
from place to place for the sake of change; 
in the thirty years that the Pennsylvania 
neighborhood suggested has been settled, it 
has changed owners two or three times. The 
sight of money will tempt any American to 
sell, and off he goes to new country, leaving 
the newcomer all his improvements. 

" The Ohio, Monongahela, and Allegheny 
rivers are full of fine fish, the forests of game — 
wild turkies, deer, pigeons, pheasants, etc. 
Vegetables grow to a size unknown in Europe; 
in four or five months, the splendid forests 
will be converted into smiling farms, each pro- 
ducing food enough for thirty persons, besides 
that for the cattle in the winter. These 
families, unlike the Americans, will spend the 
winter in earnest studies and innocent amuse- 
ments. In the centre of the village build a great 
temple, with houses for the clergy on either 
side; at opposite points a palace of justice, 
and a meeting place ; beyond a college and a 
school for girls. In the middle of this square, 
put a fountain at the foot of a column instruct- 
ing posterity as to the motives of the emi- 
116 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

grants settled here. Erect a hospital cared for 
by Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul; workshops 
where local material can be manufactured for 
the use of the people, the fifty families of the 
settlement, governed by twelve administrators, 
one-fourth reelected annually ; the newcomers, 
all French, will produce hats and linen and 
cloth and other useful articles, and as each 
year will bring new hands, new industries will 
be introduced. Their products will find ready 
markets in Kentucky and in the South and 
the Antilles. The profits can be used to buy 
land as an endowment for schools, churches, 
etc. New colonies will rise in other quar- 
ters, where new industries will follow — glass- 
making, potteries, watchmaking, papermak- 
ing, iron works, all supplied with ex- 
perts from France. All these colonies will 
unite in building a central city, to be called St. 
Peter's, where illustrious Frenchmen will be 
immortalized, by streets, fountains, squares, 
etc., named Fenelon, Buffon, Paschal, Catinat, 
Rousseau, Racine, Corneille, La Fontaine, 
Massillon, Vincent de Paul, Sully, Necker, 

Montesquieu, Tollendal, Mounier, Clermont- 
117 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

Tonnerre. Have a bishop and twelve clergy- 
men, five magistrates, twelve heads of business, 
a college with professors of medicine, mathe- 
matics, botany, chemistry, teachers of music 
and drawing; the town reserved for the 
proprietors, tradesmen and mechanics will live 
in the suburbs; many of the clergymen will 
also be teachers ; the bishop will be elected by 
heads of families, and he will be the head of 
a future university, so that the State of Penn- 
s} T lvania and the United States will benefit 
by the example and instruction of this French 
colony." The author suggests some improve- 
ments in the American government ; "let it 
divide the country into eight monarchies, or 
into a number of small republics, or into a 
Southern Monarchy and a Northern Republic, 
thus securing justice and moderation which 
would be lost in a single great Republic." 

In a letter dated Philadelphia, December 15, 
1791, he describes his plantation on the Monon- 
gahela, and near it the home of another 
Frenchman, Montpelier, whose owners have 
had a romantic history that fills many pages. 
On the advice of Francklin [sic] the hero of 
118 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

the story and his sweetheart sailed for America, 
were married at the Catholic Church in Phila- 
delphia, went to Fort Pitt, made near it their 
future home; then after five years (with a 
fortune inherited in France) built a new house 
filled with every luxury; not far off was the 
home of another French family, that of M. de 
Lassus, with every attraction, thus offering to 
Americans the best examples of good taste, 
and to other French exiles the advantage of 
other countrymen near by. One such, M. Au- 
drain, has for five or six years lived at Fort 
Pitt, and helped his countrymen ruined by the 
Scioto Company's failure. 

The letters of Lezay Marnezia are interest- 
ing as a typical example of the dreams of 
exiled Frenchmen, for a home in America, as 
a refuge from the storms in France. Im- 
practicable as his schemes seem to-day, still 
they no doubt attracted the notice of some 
of those Frenchmen who did come to the United 
States and made a valuable addition to its 
population. 

Lezay Marnezia [Claude Francois Adrien, 
Marquis de], born in Metz, France, August 
119 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

24, 1735, died in Besancon, November 9, 1800, 
was captain in the King's Regiment, retired 
to his estate, abolished " corvees et mainmorte " 
there, advocated in the assembly equal taxation 
and suppression of feudal privileges; joined 
the left, and left France in 1790, taking 
workingmen, farmers, and artists, to found a 
colony in Pennsylvania ; spent a year in try- 
ing to do so, and after its failure returned by 
way of England to France; then went to 
Switzerland and to France finally. Among 
many writings, he published a letter to M. 
Adriani, merchant, Pittsburg, describing his 
stay in Pennsylvania [Paris, 1797] ; he pub- 
lished in Paris, 1792, his " Voyage." His son 
wrote a book, " Considerations sur les Etats de 
Massachusetts et Pennsj T lvanie," Paris, 1795. 
Another son who had accompanied the father 
to Pennsylvania, became a French Senator in 
1852 and died in that year. 



XI 

French Plan of Education in the 

United States 

Dupont de Nemours helped, under Ver- 
gennes, in the recognition of the United States 
by France, became secretary of the assembly 
of notables, and a member of the Etats 
generaux, as representative from Nemours, in 
1795, one of the Conseil des Anciens, an exile 
to the United States in 1797, remaining there 
until 1802; he left France again in 1815, 
joining his sons, who had established themselves 
in business in Delaware, and died there in 1817. 
He published in Paris in 1812 a work on 
National Education in the United States. 1 It 
was, he says, in his Preface, written in 1800 at 
the request of Mr. Jefferson, then Vice-Presi- 
dent of the United States. He says : " The 
United States are more advanced in educa- 



1 Dupont de Nemours: "Sur l'Education Nationale 
dans les Etats Unis d'Ame>ique," 2e edition, Paris, 1812. 
121 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

tion than most other countries. There are 
many schools for children, almost every one 
learns to read, write and reckon. Only four 
per thousand do not. while in Spain, Portugal, 
and Italy, hardly one-sixth can do so; in Ger- 
many and France more than one-third, in 
Poland, only two per cent., and in Russia not 
1 per cent. England, Holland, and the Protes- 
tant cantons of Switzerland come next to the 
United States. He urges Congress to offer 
prizes for the best books for education. Their 
sale will bring in an income of $50,000. while 
$10,000 will pay for the books and the prizes. 
He advises the establishment of colleges in 
every county, or in less populous neighbor- 
hoods for every group of two or more. Free 
scholarships should be given according to the 
votes of the students, to be held for seven years. 
Six professors can teach in each college, seven 
classes, ten courses, twenty sciences, and forty 
methods ot' studying them will provide a pro- 
gramme. Each class will vote for the prizes 
to be awarded to its members, and at the end 
of seven years the winners will be made free 
students at the University. He gives tables 
10^ 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

of the distribution of hours and studies, and a 
schedule of salaries: 

One president at $500 a year ; six professors 
at $300, $1,800; two supervisors, at $200, 
$400; one cook at $200; three servants at 
$150, $450; prizes, repairs, etc., $150; total 
$3,500 ; for ten colleges, $35,000. 

One hundred and forty free scholarships, 
fourteen for each college, at $150, $56,000; 
special schools, $10,500 ; fifty free students in 
schools, $10,000; cost of a college in Virginia, 
$76,500. 

Students' annual fees; $150; students other 
than free scholars, $125 ; students for open 
courses, $100. 

The special schools will be those of The- 
ology, Law, Medicine, Arts, which with the 
colleges and the primary and secondary schools 
will constitute the University of North 
America. 

The course in the Medical School should 
cover five years, the Law School three years, 
the School of Social Science three years, the 
School of Mathematics three years. Each 



123 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

State and the L T nited States should each have a 
Council of Instruction, to be in close touch 
with the Legislatures and Executive. 

This paper is dated New York, 15 June, 
1800. 






XII 

French Colonies in the United States: 
Gallipolis, Ohio; Asylum, Pennsylvania 

The story of the French colony at Galli- 
polis is told by McMaster in the second volume, 
pp. 146, etc., of his History of the United 
States. " It is no wonder that the sad experi- 
ence of the French emigrants attracted to that 
place by the Scioto Land Company and its 
agent in France, Barlow, and its manager in 
New York, Duer, long deterred any similar 
attempts. Barlow went to Paris just after 
the opening of the French Revolution, and 
began to sell title deeds to estates in the West 
at five shillings the acre. Tempted by his 
exaggerated descriptions of the land, the soil, 
and the climate, no taxes, no military service, 
no soldiers to live on the people, no wolves, 
or foxes, no bears or tigers, the land on the 
shores of the Ohio, called the Beautiful, in its 

waters enormous fish, on its banks majestic 
125 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

trees, out of whose sides ran sugar, and bushes 
with berries yielding wax, — with such a picture 
before them, numbers of Frenchmen made haste 
to sell what little stores of worldly goods they 
had and buy lands in America. Before the 
close of 1791 five hundred emigrants from 
Havre, Bordeaux, Nantes, and Rochelle, were 
on the sea. Some could build coaches, some 
make perukes, some carve, others gild. The 
first shipload started with words of encourage- 
ment from Barlow, under the charge of a man 
named Boulogne, who was bidden to inform 
the gentlemen proprietors of lands on the 
Scioto, that each was to receive a house lot 
and a right to the commons in the city they 
were about to found. They were to be the 
fathers and founders of a nation. In May, 
1790, after a voyage of seventy-two days, the 
first shipload brought to Alexandria, Virginia, 
two hundred of the newcomers, and one hun- 
dred and twenty arrived a little later. After 
the hardships of their long voyages, came the 
discovery that the agent in charge was a knave. 
Some had lost clothing, some baggage, which 

they asked in vain that the Scioto Company 
126 



i 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

should reimburse them. A few took refuge 
with the French Minister and were sent home. 
The rest, after endless hardships, reached the 
promised land, only to find that the sellers had 
no title to the land. At the end of a year 
food gave out and they were forced to beg or 
buy it from the emigrants that went by on the 
river. In the spring of 1792 the Indians 
carried off one of their number. Filled with 
alarm, some went to Detroit, some to Kaskaskia, 
and of the few that remained, travellers gave 
a sad description. In 1795 Congress gave 
them twenty-four thousand acres of land oppo- 
site the mouth of the Little Sandy River, and 
three years later twelve hundred more, known 
as the French Grant." The site of the Scioto 
Company was within the territory which 
Franklin nearly forty years before had pointed 
out for colonization. 

As early as 1754, soon after the Albany 
Convention of that year, Franklin wrote a 
paper " For Settling two Western Colonies in 
North America" (printed in Smyth's Frank- 
lin, vol. iii, p. 358, etc.), in which he argued 

that this would prevent " the dreaded junction 
127 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

of the French settlements in Canada with those 
in Louisiana," and suggested that " two char- 
ters be granted, each for some considerable part 
of the lands west of Pennsylvania and the Vir- 
ginian mountains, to a number of the nobility 
and gentry of Britain, with such Americans as 
shall join them in contributing to the settle^ 
ment of these lands, either by paying a pro- 
portion of the expense of making such settle- 
ments, or by actually going thither in person 
and settling themselves and families. That by 
such charters it be granted that every actual 

settler be entitled to a tract of acres for 

himself, and acres for every poll in the 

family he carries with him; and that every 

contribution of guineas be entitled to a 

quantity of land equal to the share of a single 
settler," etc. A small fort on the Buffalo 
Creek on the Ohio, and another at the mouth 
of the Tioga, on the south side of Lake Erie, 
where a post should be formed, and a town 
erected, for the trade of the lakes, would suffice. 
The river Scioto, which runs into the Ohio, 
is supposed the fittest seat for the other colony, 

there being for forty miles on each side of it 

128 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

a body of all rich land, the finest spot in its 
bigness in all North America, and has the 
particular advantage of sea coal in plenty 
(even above ground in two places), for fuel, 
when the woods shall be destroyed. Again, in 
1772 (Smyth's Franklin, vol. v, p. 479, etc.) 
Franklin urged the confirmation of Walpole's 
grant for a settlement on the Ohio River. He 
said that the lands in question are excellent, 
the climate temperate ; native grapes, silk- 
worms, and mulberry-trees are everywhere; 
hemp grows spontaneously in the valleys and 
low lands; iron ore is plenty in the hills, and 
no soil is better adapted for the culture of 
tobacco, flax, and cotton. 

In " Travels in America," by Thomas Twin- 
ing [reprinted, New York, 1894], the young 
Englishman speaks of meeting at Mr. Bing- 
ham's in Philadelphia, in 1795, Count de 
Noailles and Count Tilley, and the celebrated 
Mons. Volney, of whom he says : " He told 
me he should probably publish some account 
of America. He examined things very mi- 
nutely. I cannot say I was much pleased with 
Mons. Volney. He was cold and satirical. I 
9 129 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

concluded that the political troubles in which 
he had been engaged, and the persecution 
which had banished him from his country, had 
caused this splenetic unsociablencss or increased 
a constitutional irritability. He was little 
pleased with America, and where he was not 
pleased he expressed himself with much 
severity. As a philosopher he might be ex- 
pected to sec with less surprise and dissatisfac- 
tion the imperfections of a new State, so remote 
from the improvements and influence of 
Europe ; and as the guest of America he might 
be expected to repay her hospitality with more 
urbanity and indulgence. It appeared to me 
that Monsieur Volney was disappointed be- 
cause he had unreasonably expected too much, 
and unjust in blaming a society that could 
hardly be other than it was." Twining also 
mentions seeing " a tall gentleman in a blue 
coat, pointed out as M. Talleyrand," walking 
on Chestnut Street, in Philadelphia. 

volney's travels in the united states 

Volney says that the land of the Scioto 

Company offered in Paris at six livres an acre 
130 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

was really worth six or seven sous an acre, but 
partly misled by Brissot's book, partly by the 
growing disorders in France, in 1791 quite 
a number of purchasers sailed from Havre, 
Bordeaux, Nantes, and Rochelle, for their new 
home. In 1795 Volney could get no particu- 
lars of the colony at Gallipolis, and made the 
journey thither to see it. He heard the story 
from the settlers and saw the poor results of 
their efforts to make a living — only fifty were 
left. He visited Vinccnnes on the Wabash, 
where a colony of French " Canadians " had 
settled before the American Revolution. 
" After being by turns French and Spanish and 
American subjects, the government, in 1792, in 
compensation for their losses, gave them four 
hundred acres for each taxpayer, and one hun- 
dred more for every man who could bear arms ; 
but hunters rather than farmers, they sold 
their lands to Americans for one-tenth of their 
value and took payment in goods at far more 
than their real value. Reduced to poverty, the 
old settlers complain, but in vain, of laws they 
do not understand, and judges who do not 
understand them. The Americans charge them 
131 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

with indolence and ignorance; there were no 
schools until the French Revolution sent them 
a missionary, — yet of ninety French settlers, 
hardly six could read or write, while of 
every hundred Americans, ninety can do so. 
Largely sprung from French soldiers sent to 
Canada, they still long for a military govern- 
ment. The same conditions exist with the 
French settlers in Illinois, Kaskaskia, Caho- 
kias, Prairie du Rocher, St. Louis; within five 
or six years the Americans have become owners 
of all the good land. Only a hundred and 
fifty French families were reported by Sargent, 
secretary of the Northwest Territory, in 1790. 
The same conditions existed at Fort Detroit, 
most of the French going across the boundary 
into King George's Canada, just as those 
further southwest to New Orleans and other 
parts of Louisiana." Volney regrets that the 
French colony of Gallipolis had not gone to 
one of the old French settlements and strength- 
ened it. 

Volney saw Gallipolis in 1796, and in his 
" View of the Climate and Soil of the United 
States " says he was struck with the wild ap- 
132 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

pearance and the sallow complexions, thin 
visages and sickly looks and uneasy air of its 
inhabitants. One of the settlers at Gallipolis 
was Jean Jules Le Moyne de Villers, a native 
of Paris. He settled in Washington, Penn- 
sylvania, about 1797, became a leading physi- 
cian, and was a generous benefactor of local 
education. His descendants are active and 
useful citizens. 

There was a settlement made by the French 
under the old claim on the site of the present 
city of Erie, Pennsylvania, where they built a 
rude log fort called " Presq'Isle," the first one 
of the chain of forts built by the French from 
the St. Lawrence to the Ohio. Not a trace was 
left forty years after its capture by the 
British, in the old French War. 

The Centennial of Gallipolis, celebrated 
October 16-19, 1890, by the Ohio State 
Archeological and Historical Society, is fully 
described in its volume (Columbus, Ohio, 
1895), with illustrations — the city of 1890, 
views of the cabins built 1791, its pub- 
lic square in 1790 and in 1846, a map of 

1791, and maps of the purchases of the Ohio 
133 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND KXILES 

and Scioto Companies and that issued by the 
latter in Paris to be shown to intending settlors. 
An exposition of relics brought together quite 

a goodly array of articles of furniture, etc., 
brought out by the original settlers and still 
cherished by their descendants and their 

owners. 

Mr. John L, Vance read a paper on '* The 
French Settlement and Settlers oi' Gallipots" 
(pp« M5— 81); he quotes at Length a letter of 
M. Mentelle, one oi' the original settlers, 
printed in the American Pioneer, Cincinnati, 
April, 1848, and an earlier letter from Mr. 
Le Tnre, a Gallipolis merchant, dated July (>. 

179$, with a gloomy view oi' the prospect. It 

was largely through Duponceau's help thai 

Congress made M the Freneh Granl n of 

twenty-fonr thousand aeres opposite the Little 
Sandy, for the people oi' Gallipolis. He gives 
a sketch M map oi' the fonr-acre lots drawn by 
tlie inhabitants of GaUipolis January 20, 

1791 > M with a numeral list oi' the town lots, 
with their original disposition, making in all 
two hundred and thirty-four, and all names art 1 
French. There is also a paper of December 
134 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

14, 1795, giving the plan of distribution of 
the town- and out-lots. Reference is made to 
the account given by John Heckewelder of his 
visit in 1792, in company with General Putnam, 
when they found skilled workmen, goldsmiths 
and watchmakers, stonecutters and sculptors, 
whose productions were sold as far as New 
Orleans, a glassworker making thermometers 
and barometers, and chemists making nitric 
acid, phosphorus, etc. There is also a long 
extract from H. M. Brackenridge's Recol- 
lections. He stopped at Gallipolis previous 
to 1795, with Dr. Saugrain, chemist, nat- 
ural philosopher, and physician, a royalist 
like most of the settlers, making a bold 
struggle against great difficulties. A school 
started twenty years later, was called Gallia 
Academy, and Gallia County perpetuates the 
nationality of the French settlers of Gallipolis. 
In 1824 Lafayette visited it, as Louis Philippe 
and his brothers did at a much earlier date, on 
their way to New Orleans. To-day it is a 
prosperous town, but with few descendants of 
the original French settlers. A translation is 

given of Manasseh Cutler's " Description," 
135 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

etc., for Barlow's use in floating the Scioto 
Company in France, published in Paris 
in 1789, from the original English ver- 
sion issued in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1787. 
The copy used bears on its title-page the name 
of one of the French settlers, dated 1805. An 
account is given (p. 123) of the Society of 
the Scioto, organized in Paris by Barlow, in 
1789, to which he sold three million acres, at 
$1.14 per acre. A land office was opened 
in Paris, and maps with glowing descriptions 
of the lands on the Ohio and the Scioto were 
issued. Gallipolis was laid out, and one of 
the original deeds is still preserved there. Full 
details are given of the transfer to the Ohio 
Company, and of the complicated difficulties 
that led to the failure of these great land 
schemes, of Duponceau's efforts to secure from 
Congress relief for his defrauded countrymen, 
and abstracts of the laws passed for the 
purpose. 

Volney, after an imprisonment of ten 
months in France, sailed in 1795 for the 
United States, remaining there until 1798, 

when the " epidemic animosity against the 
136 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

French " compelled him to leave the country. 
In the English edition of his " View, etc., of 
the United States," (London, 1804-, pp. 355, 
etc.), he gives an account of Gallipolis, or the 
French colony on the Ohio. He attributes 
much of the success of the Scioto Company's 
scheme in Paris to Brissot's account in his 
Travels in the United States. The emigra- 
tion began in 1791, through Havre, Bordeaux, 
Nantes, and Rochelle. 

Volney on his arrival in Philadelphia, in 
1795, inquired in vain after the colony, so in 
the following summer he travelled from Phila- 
delphia through Virginia, in an open boat 
down the Great Kanhaway \hvc\ into the Ohio, 
and at last reached the village of Gallipolis. 
There he found two rows of little white houses, 
built on the flat summit of the bank of the 
Ohio. He found the place wild and unkempt, 
the people thin, sickly, and uneasy. The 
houses were nothing but huts made of trunks 
of trees, plastered with clay and covered with 
shingles, whitewashed, but damp and badly 
sheltered from the weather. About five hun- 
dred settlers, all of them mechanics, artists, or 
137 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

tradesmen in easy circumstances, had come in 
1791 and 1792, to New York, Philadelphia, 
and Baltimore. Each had paid twenty or 
twenty-four guineas for passage, and their 
journey by land in France and America had 
cost as much more. After an Indian assault, 
the greater number abandoned the place, some 
removing to Louisiana. Then after more 
litigation, the remaining settlers obtained a 
tract of nine hundred and twelve acres from 
the Ohio Company. In 1795 Congress granted 
twenty thousand acres to the poor pillaged 
Frenchmen, and Volney found them trying to 
secure a livelihood on their new home. Later 
he visited the French colonies on the Mississippi 
and Lake Erie. At St. Vincent the French 
settlers had been established for sixty years, 
and there as with those at Kaskaskia, Caho- 
kia, Rocky Meadows, and St. Louis, discour- 
agement, apathy, and wretchedness prevailed. 
Andre Michaux's " Travels into Kentucky, 
1793-96," and Francois Andre Michaux's 
" Travels to the West of the Allegheny Moun- 
tains in the States of Ohio, Kentucky, and 
Tennessee," 1802, have been reprinted by 
138 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

Thwaites in vol. iii of his " Early Western 
Travels," Cleveland, Ohio, 1904-. 

The son presented to the American Philo- 
sophical Society the father's field notes, and 
these were printed by the American Philosoph- 
ical Society in 1889. Although Michaux's 
comment on the French settled in the West is 
unfavorable, yet he records the number of 
Frenchmen who became prominent and useful 
citizens of the West — Lucas at Pittsburg, 
Lacassagne at Louisville, Tardiveau, Hourie, 
and Depauw at Danville. Father and son both 
visited Gallipolis; the former speaks of it as 
" that unfortunate colony ; of the six hundred 
persons who came there to settle, only one 
hundred and fifty remained in 1793." In 
1802 the son visited Gallipolis and found that 
only thirty families had gone to the lands 
granted by Congress, while most of the 
original log houses were in ruins, the former 
owners having gone elsewhere, some to New 
Orleans, others to Pittsburg and points in 
Western Pennsylvania. Thwaites says that 
in 1893 Gallipolis had grown into a flourishing 
town, through the energy of the American and 
139 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

German settlers, and bui three families dc- 
scendants of the French colonists lived there. 

TllK KUKNCI1 COLONY OF ASYLUM IN PENN- 
SYLVANIA 

Rochefoucauld, in vol. i, p. 151, of his 

Travels in the United States, gives an account 

of his visit to the colony of " A/.vl M in Penn- 
sylvania. It is perhaps the earliest descrip- 
tion of an attempt to eoloni/o French royalist 

exiles, made under auspices thai at the outset 
promised Buccess. Rochefoucauld gives the 

names of the principal settlers l)e Blaeons, 
a deputy in the Constituent Assembly from 

Dauphine, and his wife, Mdlle. de INfaulde; 

they were keeping a store, in partnership with 
M. Colin, formerly the Abbe de Sevigne; M. de 
Montnle, captain of cavalry ; his cousin, Mme. 
de Sybert, oi' St. Domingo; De Bee de Lievre, 
in partnership with the Messieurs de la Hone, 
officers of the French army; M. Beaulieu, 
captain oi' infantry in France, served in the 
Pulaski Legion in the American War of Inde- 
pendence, keeping a tavern; M. Bayard, 
planter Prom St. Domingo, now with wife and 
140 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

children and some aegroes who came with 
them , M. de Xoailles, of St. Domingo; M. 
d'Audelotj of Franohc-Comte, formerly an 
officer in the French army, then a farmer; Du- 
petit Thouars, officer of the French navy, now 
farming; his companion in his adventurous 
escape from Brazil, M. Nores ; Mr. Keating 
(the founder of a well-known family in Phila- 
delphia), M. Renaud, an exile from St. 
Domingo; M. Carlier, Canon of Quercy ; M. 
Prevost, of Paris, well known for his active 
charitable work there, now a farmer on his little 
property on the North Branch of the Susque- 
hanna; Mme. d'Autrepont, with her sons, work- 
ing for daily bread, like all the members of the 
colony. 

One fault of the French settlers was their 
unwillingness to learn the language or conform 
to the customs of their neighbors, the old 
American settlers. The other, said Roche- 
foucauld, is the need of more and better work- 
ing-people, to make the somewhat unfavor- 
able site at least as prosperous as the other 
farm settlements. The Duke's hopes for the 
French colony at Asylum were not realized, 
HI 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

and its failure is described by later travellers 
and in the account given by a resident of to- 
day. 

Rochefoucauld mentions all the Frenchmen 
he met on his long journey, mostly individual 
settlers, trying, as in South Carolina, to intro- 
duce home industries, but few of them suc- 
ceeded or left any lasting trace of their 
residence. Mrs. Murray in her account of 
Asylum says that the thirty houses built for 
the settlers had chimneys, doors, staircases, 
window-glass, shutters, and piazzas and sum- 
mer-houses, all unknown luxuries to the few 
neighboring old residents. Some quaint little 
shops were on the public square with a small 
chapel and a theatre, as well as a bakery, all 
evidence of French needs. 

Asylum, near Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, 
was planned by the Vicomte Louis de Xoailles, 
a brother-in-law of Lafayette, and the 
Marquis Omer Talon; it was a land com- 
pany owning a large tract on the North 
"Branch of the Susquehanna. Established in 
170-i. on land sold to the Company by Morris 
and Nicholson, it secured a tract of two thou- 
148 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

sand acres, and a M. Boulogne was the active 
manager until he was drowned in 1796 in Sulli- 
van County and buried at Asylum. The first 
settlers came in 1793, among them Dupetit 
Thouars, later killed in command of a man-of- 
war at the battle of the Nile. Noailles was em- 
ployed by Robert Morris, but soon left to take 
part in the French attack on Havana, and died 
of the wounds received in action. A Catholic 
church was built, and a large house put up, it 
was said for the King and Queen of France, 
when they should make their escape from cap- 
tivity and seek safety in shelter among their 
loyal friends at Asylum. 

Rochefoucauld in his Travels describes it 
as he saw it on his visit in 1795. A year 
later an English traveller, Weld, visited it and 
tells what he saw in his Travels. Wilson, the 
ornithologist, was there in 1804 and refers to 
it in his poem describing his pedestrian tour to 
Niagara. Louis Philippe and his brother 
came there too from Philadelphia. John 
Keating, an exile from St. Domingo, was one 
of the settlers for a time and remained the 

agent of the Company in Philadelphia and 
143 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

wound up its business. He was the first of a 
family well known in Philadelphia and still 
affiliated with France. Some of the colonists 
returned to France and became men of note; 
others went to New Orleans, and in ten 
years the colony was at an end. The Honor- 
able John Laporte, M.C., was the son of one 
of the colonists. Mr. J. W. Ingham described 
it in the New England Magazine, N. S., vol. 
xxxi, pp. 81, etc., 1904-05. "Exiled from 
France and from St. Domingo, thousands of 
Frenchmen sought shelter in the United 
States." 

" The Story of Some French Refugees and 
their Colony of Azilum," 1793-1800, by 
Louise Welles Montgomery, Athens, Pennsyl- 
vania, 1903, is the local version of their trials. 
The original plot of their settlement is in the 
Bradford County Historical Society. Omcr 
Talon came to Philadelphia in 1792, and took 
the oath of allegiance to the State of Pennsyl- 
vania. He joined in Philadelphia the Vicomte 
de Noailles, who was in business with William 
Bingham, and had bought land from Robert 
Morris. Their agent selected eight lots of 
X44 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

three hundred acres each in Luzerne County 
on the North Branch of the Susquehanna, for 
a French colony. They also bought one hun- 
dred thousand acres of wild land, on the Loyal- 
sock ; in 1794 they organized a land company 
on the basis of a capital stock of a million 
acres, in five thousand shares of two hundred 
acres each. In 1801 the Company was reor- 
ganized, and later on the land was sold by 
trustees. Talon and Dupetit Thouars and 
Boulogne were active managers. Some of the 
roads built by Omer Talon are still in use, 
and one is to-day known as " The Old French 
Road." A weekly express to Philadelphia was 
maintained for several years. The Due de 
Rochefoucauld describes the place as he saw it 
in 1795 — a settlement in the wilds made for 
French people of position at home. 

The deeds conveying property mentioned 
some of the advantages of the properties. Mrs. 
Murray prints an agreement by which Sophia 
de Sibert sold Nos. 416 and 417 of the Asylum 
Company's property to Gui de Noailles, and 
describes the house as having fireplaces, the 

garden a number of fruit trees, young Lom- 
10 145 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

bardy poplars and weeping willows, and a 
lattice summer house, and a nursery of nine 
hundred apple trees, with a gristmill and a 
barn that might be altered into a dwelling- 
house. 

Among the relics brought from France there 
was a beautiful illuminated missal, used in the 
religious services in the log chapel, later given 
to a priest in Tonawanda, by whom it was 
taken to Rome and presented to the Vatican 
Museum. Even those of the settlers who re- 
turned to France gave accounts of the Susque- 
hanna Valley which later attracted settlers 
whose descendants still live in Bradford 
County, Pennsylvania, notably the Piollets and 
the Delpeuchs. 

The fate of the originators of "Azylum M 

was very sad. Noailles died of his wounds in 

a successful naval engagement off Havana; 

Dupetit Thouars fell in the Battle of the Nile, 

and Omer Talon returned to France and died 

in an insane asylum ; De Blacons too returned, 

became a member of the National Assembly, 

and died by his own hand ; Fromentin, once 

priest, became a judge in Florida; Beaulieu 
146 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

left descendants now known as Boileau, scat- 
tered through Pennsylvania. 

In 1801 John Brevost advertised in the 
Wilkes-Barre Gazette that he would open at 
Asylum a school for teaching the French lan- 
guage, " which within a hundred years has 
become the common tongue of Europe; is 
spoken by two large regions of the continent, 
and which the reward of a sincere friendship 
between the American and French nations will 
render necessary to young gentlemen who in- 
tend to follow the political or mercantile life ; " 
his price was sixty bushels of wheat a year, 
but he soon moved to New Orleans. 

The list of taxables at Asylum for the year 
1796 (the earliest known) has a goodly array 
of French names, but it is pathetic to follow 
the decrease in successive years, showing the 
scattering of the settlers. " The French at 
Asylum " are the subj ects of a paper by the 
Reverend David Craft, printed by the Wyom- 
ing Historical Society, in vol. viii of its Pro- 
ceedings, in 1902, following an earlier paper 
by him of 1898, in vol. v, for 1900. It de- 
scribes actual visits and the results of a careful 
147 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

inspection of the traces of the settlement of 
1795. 

Of the " great " house, where Omer Talon 
lived in generous hospitality, entertaining 
travelling Frenchmen, and caring for his 
neighbors, not a trace is left, while the gardens 
and orchards have all disappeared, and all 
that they were is told in Alexander Wilson's 
verse : 

" Gaul's exiled royalists, a pensive train, 
Here raise the hut and clear the rough domain," 

while of their leaders, there are remembered 
only Noailles and Dupetit Thouars, and that 
for their heroic death in the service of their 
country. 

In Alexander Gray don's Memoirs (Harris- 
burg, 1811 ) he says : " A letter about the year 
1790 or 1791 introduced to me Mr. Talon, then 
engaged with the Viscomte de Noailles in estab- 
lishing a settlement on the North Branch of 
the Susquehanna, and to which they gave the 
name of Assylum [sic]. He several times 
passed through Harrisburg. Mr. Talon fully 

justified to my conception the favorable idea 
148 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

of a Frenchman of rank. I have seldom seen 
a gentleman with whose manners I was more 
pleased. Though he spoke but little English, 
and I less French, yet from the knowledge we 
had of each other's language, we contrived to 
make ourselves mutually understood. On one 
of his visits to Harrisburg he was attended 
by not less than ten or a dozen gentlemen, all 
adventurers in the new establishment, from 
which they had just returned on their way to 
Philadelphia. Of these I only recollect the 
names of M. de Blacons, Captain Keating, and 
Captain Boileau. Captain Keating was an 
Irishman, and Captain Boileau had been among 
the troops which had served in this country. 
M. Blacons expatiated on a projected road 
from Assylum to Philadelphia, which required 
nothing but the consent of the Legislature, to 
be completed out of hand. Talon had been 
adverse to the Revolution in France in all its 
stages and modifications. He was the person 
on account of whose courteous reception Gen- 
eral Washington had been roundly taken to 
task by the Citizen Genet. The Duke de la 

Rochefoucauld gives some particulars of the 
149 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

Assylum settlement, humorously called by some 
of the settlers, rcfugium peccatorum, and 
enumerates the families which had established 
themselves there. The settlement is now en- 
tirely abandoned by the French; a tract more 
rugged and mountainous could hardly be 
found. It agrees with Mr. Talon's account 
of it : ' A narrow strip of flat land along the 
river.' Talon was Avocat General under the 
old regime, of the family of the one spoken of 
by Cardinal de Retz." 



XIII 

French Settlement in Iowa 

Theee has been little written about the 
French settlements in Iowa, chiefly because the 
French pioneers made few settlements in Iowa 
that continued and because the immigration 
since has been slight. Of French communities 
existing to-day there arc but four in the State. 
Near Waterloo, south and cast, there is a com- 
munity that was known as " Frenchtown " in 
common parlance, but in the Postal Guide it 
goes under the name of Gilbertville. There is 
a French community near Woodstock, a rural 
agricultural folk. Not far from Sioux City is 
a little town of Salix, made up almost wholly 
of French, many of them descendants of 
Canadian voyageurs who returned from fruit- 
less expeditions up the Missouri River in the fur- 
trading days and became the pioneers of Wood- 
bury County and the first settlers of Sioux City. 

In the northern part of Washington County, 
151 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

Iowa, in the southeastern portion of the State, 
there is another French community. It is some- 
what interfused with other peoples at present. 
Another French community is the religious 
brotherhood at the monastery of Melleray, not 
far from Dubuque, in northeastern Iowa. Of 
the early settlements, Dubuque contained the 
greatest number and they constitute to-day a 
noticeable element in that city. Girard (now 
McGregor) opposite Prairie du Chien in Wis- 
consin, Bellevue in Jackson County, and Mont- 
rose in Lee County, and St. Mary's, Pottawat- 
tamie County, are defunct French settlements. 
Davenport and Keokuk contain some descend- 
ants and originals of the pioneer French stock 
that first invaded Iowa. Not a few of the 
Icarians or their descendants are found in 
Keokuk to-day. The architect of Iowa's 
capitol was an Icarian, S. Picquenard. 1 

The Socialist colony of Icaria in Iowa is 
described by Nordhoff in his " Communistic 
Societies of the United States," New York, 
1875, pp. 334, etc., and in an article in the 

1 Letter from Prof. F. I. Herriott, Drake University, 
Dubuque, Iowa. 

152 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

London Quarterly Review of June, 1848, pp. 
16, etc., and by Hillquist in his " History of 
Socialism in the United States." He says the 
founder, Cabet, was born in Dijon in 1788, 
was a member of the French Assembly in 1834. 
He bought a million acres in Texas, arrived 
in New Orleans in 1848, with four hundred 
followers, and by 1849 had five hundred. The 
Texas scheme failed, and he next moved to 
Nauvoo, Illinois, lately abandoned by the Mor- 
mons; in 1856 Cabet was expelled, and he died 
soon after in St. Louis, near which some hun- 
dred of his adherents settled, but that colony 
broke up in 1859. The others had gone to Iowa 
and established a colony which broke up in 
1887, part of it going to California, while 
the old Icaria ended in 1895. The California 
colony lasted only a few years, but was fol- 
lowed by many French settlers, to whom is 
largely due the successful culture of vineyards, 
olive and fig and peach and other small fruits, 
which contribute greatly to the prosperity of 
the State. 

" Soon after the last remnant of Mormon 

population disappeared from Nauvoo there 
153 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

appeared on that historic spot the advance 
agents of a now colony seeking opportunity 
to exploit other peculiar theories of social life 
in this far western country. 1 Nauvoo was an 
ideal site for such an experiment, and the 
agents hastily returned to New Orleans with a 
favorable report and an option on the land 
for the waiting colonists. These were the 
Icarians, a considerable body of communists, 
organized in France by Ktienne Cabet of 
Dijon. The foundation of his dream of abso- 
lute equality, as typified in a democratic re- 
public to be called learia, was laid in 1880, 
and by 1817 four hundred thousand names 
were reported as signed to the Social Compact. 
A year later, having obtained a largo tract of 
land in Texas, an advance guard of sixty-nine 
sailed from France to take formal possession; 
others followed, but from various causes, more 
particularly the nature o\' the country and the 
prevalence o\' malarial fever, this first colonisa- 
tion was an utter failure, so that when, in 
1819. Cabet reached New Orleans and took 

•Settlement of the Icarians at Nauvoo, p. 347, 

Parrish's Historic Illinois. 

154 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

personal command of the entire force, then 
numbering five hundred, including many 
women and children, agents wen- despatched up 

the Mississippi seeking a more suitable location 
for permanent settlement. 

" In March, 1849, the remnant of the colony, 
still firm in belief of their dream, began their 
journey up the river. It proved a fearful 
one. Cholera broke out and many died. 
Twenty miles below Nauvoo, ice blocked 
further passage northward by steamer, and 
they were compelled to tramp the remainder of 
the way knee deep in snow and slush, carrying 
children and sick as best they could. At 
Nauvoo they found some comfort in the houses 
still standing as the banished Mormons had 
left them, yet much suffering remained. The 
climate was severe, water unwholesome, food 
costly, indeed nearly impossible to obtain at 
any price. For months they subsisted entirely 
upon beans. But in the midst of all this hard- 
ship, the spirit of the Icarians remained un- 
broken. Slowly they built their little common- 
wealth, a mere child's toy compared to the 
stately city of their enthusiastic leader's plans, 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

yet ruled by the same laws, controlled by the 
same ideals, which had made them exiles. Six 
directors, elected annually, controlled the ad- 
ministration ; the laws were made by a general 
assembly, including all men over twenty. 
Cabet was elected president year after year, 
yet exercised little authority, as the title was 
merely one of honor. The colony was purely 
communistic, the members putting their pos- 
sessions, even books and heirlooms, into the 
common fund. Furniture, tools, and cooking 
utensils were equally divided; tasks and hours 
of labor were evenly proportioned. Homes 
were separate, each family occupying its own 
house, but the colony school reared the children 
in common; all ate at one table; individualism 
was treated as unworthy. 

" For a while the community flourished and 
increased; it became fairly prosperous. By 
1855 the}' had with great industry and self- 
denial erected mills and workshops, their farms 
were well tilled, their school ranked among the 
best in the State. A well-selected library of 
over six thousand volumes had been established, 

and a well-organized trained orchestra was the 
156 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

marvel of the neighbors. A weekly magazine 

was published in three languages, with a wide 

circulation in the United States and Europe. 

New members were constantly arriving, among 

them men and women of culture, accomplished 

musicians, painters of reputation, a famous 

civil engineer, a physician of standing in 

Vienna, an authority on bee culture, Picque- 

nard, afterwards architect of the capitols 

in Iowa and Illinois; Vallet, a sociologist, 

Gauvain, officer, teacher, nobleman. Cabet 

himself was the cause of failure. Late in 1855, 

tired of being president only in name, he tried 

to have the constitution revised so as to give 

him almost dictatorial powers ; but this led to 

a bitter contest. Cabet was deposed at the 

election, but was restored on his appeal to the 

voters. 

" Later he commanded his old officials not to 

vacate their positions to those newly elected. 

This led to a strike by Cabet's loyal followers, 

who refused to work when the new directors 

were put in by force by the majority. After 

a bitter struggle the majority burned Cabet's 

' Icaria,' until then their creed, a legal divi- 
157 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

sion of the community property was decided 
upon, and Cabet by vote expelled. One hun- 
dred and eighty disciples accompanied him into 
exile, while eight hundred remained. A week 
later he died suddenly of apoplexy in St. 
Louis. His followers located six miles below 
that city, prospered for a while, then broke up. 
The majority drifted away from Nauvoo to 
a tract of land in Iowa. There by 1875 they 
reached the height of their prosperity, after 
much struggle, and then a second division 
separated the younger from the older members, 
the former drifting to California, the latter 
clinging to Icaria, until by 1895 the last 
vestige of their community had perished, al- 
most without a ripple, from mere exhaustion. 
The California colony lasted a little longer, 
but that too finally ended from want of the 
old enthusiasm and of new recruits." 



m^ im &%¥v m^ ^o^j 

eM&3 e^O^ eOa 9M&9 GA3&3 



XIV 

BONAPARTIST ExiLES 

Among French exiles to America who be- 
came prominent on their return to France, 
were Marshal Grouchy, Lefebvre Desnouettes, 
Clausel, later governor general of Algiers and 
marshal, Lackanal, later minister of educa- 
tion under Napoleon. In 1817 Parmentier 
obtained a grant of land in Alabama for 
French refugees, who left Philadelphia and 
settled at St. Stephen's, on the Tombigbee; at 
the suggestion of Comte Real it was called 
Demopolis. German Redemptioners were hired 
to work the land, but it was finally abandoned 
after vain efforts to introduce the culture of 
vines, olives, etc., leaving debts and quarrels 
with neighbors. Of the settlers Clouis, once 
secretary of the Due de Rovigo, died in Mobile 
in 1845, and Chaudron in 1846. Chaudron 
had lived in Philadelphia, delivered an oration 

on Washington before the Masonic Order, and 
159 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

was a frequent contributor to French journals. 
" The Napoleonic Exiles in America ; a 
Study in American Diplomatic History, 1815- 
1819," by Jesse S. Reeves, Ph.D. Baltimore. 
Johns Hopkins Press, September-October, 
1905, is No. 9-10 of Series 23 of Johns Hop- 
kins University Studies in History and Polit- 
ical Science. It opens with an account 
of the unfortunate colonial enterprise called 
Champs d'Asile, on the banks of the Trinity 
River, in Texas. Balzac in the third part 
of " Les Celibataires " sketched the pur- 
poses and results of the plan of founding a 
French colony of Napoleon's old soldiers, par- 
ticularly the remnant of the Old Guard, partly 
to get them out of Paris and France, to the 
relief of the newly restored Bourbons, partly 
to carry out Napoleon's vague plan of seeking 
an asylum in America. Joseph Bonaparte did 
so for sixteen years, living in or near Philadel- 
phia from 1816 until 1832. Of the other 
soldiers of Napoleon sent into exile, the first to 
land was Marshal Grouchy, who reached Balti- 
more in January, 1816, — published in Phila- 



160 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

dclphia, in 1818, his account of Waterloo, and 
in 1820 a pamphlet on Napoleon's Memoirs. 
Later came the Lallemands, Lefebvre Desnou- 
ettes, Rigaud, Clausel, Real, Galabert, Schultz, 
Combes, Jordan, Latapie, Vorster, Douarche, 
Charrasin, Taillade, Defourni, and others of 
less rank. Lakanal brought a letter from 
Lafayette to Jefferson, and first settled in 
Gallatin County, near Vevay, Indiana. 

A company was formed in Philadelphia in 
1816 to secure a grant of land for settlement 
and cultivation of vine and olive. The secre- 
tary, Colonel Parmentier, secured the grant for 
" The French Agricultural and Manufactur- 
ing Society," and the Tombigbee Association. 
General Charles Lallemand was elected presi- 
dent, and most of the shareholders were the 
French officers of Napoleon's army, whose 
names are given above. The site selected was 
on the Tombigbee River in Alabama. One 
hundred and fifty sailed from Philadelphia in 
1817, and later a still larger number; all were 
heartily welcomed. " Demopolis " was sur- 
veyed, but being outside the grant, " Aigle- 

ville " took its place. " Marengo," as the 
11 161 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

name of the county, still preserves this Napo- 
leonic idea. 

The leading colonist was Lcfebvrc Desnou- 
ettes, with a farm of five hundred acres, and a 
log cabin, which he called his sanctuary ; in it 
(tradition says) was a large bronze statue of 
Napoleon, at its base the swords and pistols 
Lefebvre had taken in battle, and on the walls 
the colors of the Emperor. Peniers and Raoul 
and Clouis were his neighbors. The colon}' soon 
melted away, and Lallemand planned another 
in Texas. Meantime Hyde de Neuville, then 
French Minister in Washington, was fright- 
ened by the plan of a Napoleonic invasion of 
Mexico, where Joseph Bonaparte was to be 
made Emperor. It really had little to do with 
the plans for the Texas colony, which landed 
in Galveston in 1818, welcomed by Lafitte, 
and all, some three or four hundred, soon left 
for the site of the new colony on Trinity River, 
where fort and blockhouses were built, ground 
was cleared, and a proclamation of its plan 
issued. It was published in Paris, and one 
hundred thousand francs were subscribed there 
for the colony. Beranger wrote a hymn in 
163 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

its honor, but the colony melted away at the 
threat of a Spanish invading force. It re- 
treated to Galveston, joined D'Auvray, a 
Frenchman who planned wresting Texas from 
Spain, but a gtorm wrecked the place, and 
Lafitte rescued them. The younger Lalle- 
mand returned to Philadelphia and after 
marrying a niece of Girard, went with the 
elder brother to Europe ; Lakanal, after a hard 
experience in the West, went to France and 
became a person of much importance. 

M. Georges Bertin gives a very clear account 
of a leading French exile in his " Joseph 
Bonaparte in America," 1815-1832 (Paris, 
1893). He describes his estate at Borden- 
town, and his large purchase of wild land in 
New York from Le Ray de Chaumont, made 
in 1814 in France, when sales of smaller tracts 
were made to Real, Caulaincourt, and later in 
1816 to Grouchy, Desfoumeaux, and others. 
Joseph Bonaparte had, before the fall of the 
Empire, loaned two hundred thousand francs 
to Le Ray, and in payment took the 
lands on the Black River which he saw 

for the first time in 1818. There he saw 
163 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

a cottonmill, an iron forge, and a papermill, 
and was delighted with the improvements made 
in the last four years. He made more pur- 
chases of land from Le Ray, making a total 
investment of $120,000, partly in payment of 
the original loan of $4*0,000, and partly in 
diamonds, carried from his French home at 
Morfontaine, hidden in Switzerland, and re- 
turned there to his agent Maillard. He built a 
house, gave hunting parties on his estate of one 
hundred and fifty thousand acres, and fished 
and sailed on his lake of twelve hundred acres, 
filled with wooded islands. His daughter 
Charlotte made sketches, of which some were 
lithographed. The Legislature of New York 
passed an act enabling him to hold the land. 
The Emperor in St. Helena approved of his 
brother's plans, and said that if he had gone 
to America, he would have gathered around 
him all his family, and with the millions he 
had given them, in a year he would have had 
sixty thousand Frenchmen with a capital of 
twenty million dollars, and America would 
have been a true asylum for those who had fled 

from the system that had triumphed in 
164 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

Europe, and from which they would send 
forth sound doctrines. Joseph made homes 
for some of the French officers exiled to 
the United States, but in 1829 he offered 
to sell land that had cost him five dollars an 
acre in 1814, for from three to seven dollars 
an acre, and said there were a thousand settlers 
with roads, mills, villages, etc. In 1835 he 
sold his land to Mr. John Lafarge of New York 
for eighty thousand dollars, a heavy loss on his 
original investment. He spent one hundred 
and fifty thousand dollars on his Bordentown 
estate, and the expenses of living there made 
deep inroads on his diminishing fortune, while 
he supplied the money to establish in New York 
the Courrier des Etats Unis, in charge of La- 
coste, formerly an officer in the French army, 
and an aid of Marshal Gerard at Waterloo. 
Hyde de Neuville on his arrival as French Min- 
ister to the United States, in 1816, found 
here, as he tells us in his Memoirs, many 
Napoleonic exiles whose movements he reported 
to his government. In New York were 
Regnault de St. Jean d'Angely, Quinet, and 

Real; in Philadelphia, Grouchy, Clausel, 
165 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

Garnier de Saintes, and near by Joseph Bona- 
parte with his associates and frequent visitors, 
among them Colonel Behr, who was planning 
for him a kingdom in Mexico, helped by 
Lakanal. Napoleon at St. Helena heard of 
the report and laughed at the idea. Lakanal 
was really in earnest at work as president of the 
University of Louisiana, a post he held until 
his return to France. 

General Bernard, according to Neuville, one 
of the conspirators, was glad to find employ- 
ment as an engineer in the service of the United 
States, and in grateful acknowledgment, named 
his son, born here in 1S19, Columbus. Re- 
turned to France after the Revolution of 1830, 
he died there holding the office of minister of 
war. Grouchy published in Philadelphia, in 
1815, his criticism of Gourgaud's account 
of Waterloo, and again, in 1820, that of the 
authenticity of the Memoirs attributed to 
Napoleon. He was one of the owners of land 
on the Black River, New York, and thus had 
business dealings with Joseph Bonaparte. An- 
other of his visitors was General Vandamme, 
in whose division Joseph Bonaparte had a regi- 
1 GO 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

rnent. He, too, lived in Philadelphia, until 
with Arnault and Bory Saint Vincent, he re- 
turned to France in 1820. The Lallemands 
were warmly welcomed by Joseph Bonaparte, 
and Neuville said they were leaders in the 
Texas colony and in the plans for a Napoleonic 
confederation in Mexico. 

Lefebvre Desnouettes was shipwrecked on 
his voyage home and lost on the Irish coast. 
Charles Lallemand, after the failure of the 
colony in Texas, opened a school and thus 
maintained himself until his return to France, 
where Louis Philippe gave him an important 
command. Charles J. Ingersoll has recorded 
in his " History of the Second War with Great 
Britain," many details of his personal acquaint- 
ance with " the Comte de Survilliers," as the 
ex-king of Spain chose to call himself. Two 
of his friends, Lallemand and Rigau, both old 
soldiers under the great Napoleon, had charge 
of the four hundred men who went to the 
French colony " Champs d'Asile." Rigau 
died in New Orleans, leaving a daughter whose 
descendants include Mme. Jules Ferry, Colonel 
Charras, Scheurer Kestner, and Charles 
167 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

v i • ■ 

Floquet. A detailed account of this French 

colony in Texas, was published in Paris in 
1820. 

Bertin cites from Ingersoll, the following 
names of Frenchmen who were visitors at 
Joseph Bonaparte's: Grouchy, Clausel, Bern- 
ard, Charles and Henry Lallemand, Lefebvre 
Desnouettes, Vandamme, Combes, Girardin, 
Latapie, the sons of Grouchy, Regnault de St. 
Jean d'Angely, Real, Miot de Melito, Lakanal, 
Quinet, two sons of Fouche, a son of Marshal 
Ney, the son of Marshal Lannes, a very fair 
showing of the French officers of Napoleon, 
from time to time in America. Lafayette him- 
self on his triumphal tour of the United States 
in 1824, was more than once a guest of 
Joseph Bonaparte. Many of his visitors re- 
turned to France and received offices from Louis 
Philippe, thus reducing his adherents in the 
vain struggle to restore his nephew, the son 
of the great Napoleon, to the throne. While 
he was supporting the French paper in New 
York he was asked to help others in France 
and England, and to get money for this pur- 
pose, he tried to sell his Black River property 
168 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

to Girard, but the death of the latter turned 
the sale in another direction. He kept 
in close touch with the attacks on the govern- 
ment of Louis Philippe and noted that of 
Cabet, later founder of Icaria, the unsuccess- 
ful colony in the West. In 1832 he left the 
United States, after a stay of seventeen years, 
and a farewell reception from the President of 
the United States, an honor not accorded him 
until he was about to leave the country. Com- 
ing to it an exile, he had planned to bring 
together many of his fellow exiles, but some of 
them returned to France to take service under 
Louis Philippe, while others returned to take up 
again the apparently hopeless effort to put a 
Bonaparte on the throne of France, and a few 
remained to lead quiet lives as good American 
citizens. 

" TlTe French Grant in Alabama ; a History 
of the Founding of Demopolis," by Gaius 
Whitfield, Jr. (From the Transactions of the 
Alabama Historical Society, Reprint No. 16.) 
Montgomery, Ala., 1904, refers to accounts in: 

1. Pickett's History of Alabama, entitled, 

" Modern French Colony in Alabama." 
169 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

2. Professor Thomas Chalmers McCorvey's 
" The Vine and Olive Colony," in Alabama 
Historical Reporter, Tuscaloosa, April, 1885. 

3. Anne Bozeman Lyon's article on " The 
Bonapartists in Alabama," in the Southern 
Home Journal, Memphis, March, 1900, and 
reprinted in the Gulf States Historical Maga- 
zine, Montgomery, March, 1903. 

4. Articles in the Demopolis Express, by 
J. W. Beeson. 

It cites from Niles , Register (note p. 324) 
an estimate that not less than thirty thousand 
French emigrants came to the United States, 
and a correction that it could not be three 
thousand. An association was organized in 
Philadelphia to establish a colony in the West, 
but its agents, Pennier and Meslier, could not 
find a suitable site. Meantime it sent Colonel 
Nicholas Parmentier to Washington to peti- 
tion Congress for a tract of land. They 
decided, finally, to settle near the confluence of 
the Black Warrior and Tombigbee Rivers, in 
what was then the Mississippi Territory. It 
was near Mobile, where there were many sym- 
pathizers, and not far from Louisiana, where 
170 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

they hoped to get help towards their plans to 
restore Napoleon to his empire. Congress 
granted them the tract by Act of March 3, 
1817, " four contiguous townships, each six 
miles square in the Mississippi Territory, at 
two dollars per acre, payable fourteen years 
after a contract with agents of the late emi- 
grants from France, associated for a settlement 
in the United States, with provisions for culti- 
vating vines, etc., no patent to be issued until 
payment had been made, nor to any one person 
for more than six acres." Parmentier sailed 
from Philadelphia and reported his arrival in 
a letter dated Mobile Bay, May 26, 1817, pub- 
lished in the National Intelligencer on the 
following July 17. 

It was decided to settle where Demopolis 
now stands, and the name of Marengo was 
given to the county. The emigrants came by 
way of Mobile and by the Ohio, chose lots, 
erected cabins, and at the suggestion of Count 
Real, one of the Philadelphia incorporators 
who never came to Alabama, named it Dem- 
opolis. The contract signed with the Secretary 

of the Treasury conveyed the land for $184,- 
171 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

320, to be paid on or before January 8, 1833. 
It provided for clearing ten acres on each tract, 
for planting five hundred olive trees within 
seven }'ears, and for annual reports as to vine 
and olive cultivation, and with it was a list of 
nearly four hundred persons to whom allot- 
ments were made, among them the two sons of 
Marshal Grouchy, General Lallemand, Colonel 
Douarche, Colonel Comb, Colonel Jordan, 
Colonel Vorster, Colonel Galabert, Colonel 
Eiigau, Lakanal, Tulane, Clouis, General 
Clausel, Colonel Charassin, Colonel Raoul, 
Colonel Taillade, Bujac, Salaignac, Brugiere, 
General Lefebvre Desnouettes, Ducommun, 
Melizet, and others still known in Philadelphia 
and Mobile. Their first town site was found 
not within their grant, so a second was laid 
out and called Aigleville. The reports of the 
agent of the treasury were regularly printed 
for Congress and described their houses, etc. ; 
but. the colonists suffered great hardships, in 
spite of frequent remittances of money and 
supplies from France. Their vines and olives 
were total failures from the unsuitable loca- 
tion. Some of the settlers went with Lalle- 
179 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

mand to Texas to establish " Champs d'Azile," 
but that too failed. In 1820 some of the St. 
Domingo refugees came from Philadelphia to 
join the Demopolis colony. In 1822 Congress 
passed an act to convey title to those who 
might pay for their land. Their agent, 
Charles Villars, said there were three hundred 
and twenty-seven persons in the colony, eighty- 
one actual planters, with eleven hundred acres 
in full cultivation, and fifteen hundred by 
lease ; ten thousand vines in full growth, and 
more than $160,000 spent. The Treasury 
Agent reported, in 1827, seven thousand four 
hundred and fourteen acres in vine, corn, cot- 
ton, small grain, etc., and in 1828 another 
agent explained the reasons for the failure of 
the vines, and in another report described the 
receipt of vines imported from France, losses 
on the way, after planting, by drought, etc. 
Many of the colonists returned to Europe, 
others to Mobile and neighboring cities ; some 
became men of importance in France, and per- 
haps the most distinguished, Lefebvre Desnou- 
ettes, was lost at sea on his way home. Colonel 

Raoul kept a ferry near Demopolis, then went 
173 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

to Mexico, returned to France and became Gov- 
ernor of Toulon. Pennier was appointed 
subagent to the Seminoles, and died in Florida. 
Clouis kept a tavern in Greensboro and died in 
Mobile. Chaudron, " the blind poet of the 
canebrake," who had edited a French paper in 
Philadelphia and attracted notice by his 
eulogy of Washington before the Grand Lodge 
of Masons in that city, died in Mobile in 1846, 
" leaving many interesting works, which were 
published in Paris." Clausel lived near Mobile, 
raising vegetables, which he sold in the city 
market; returned to France in 1825, be- 
came a marshal and was made governor gen- 
eral of Algiers by Louis Philippe. Ravesies 
was a refugee from St. Domingo, became a 
business man in Philadelphia, was made agent 
of the Tombigbee Association in 1820, and 
after living on his grant moved to Mobile, 
where he died in 1854. 

Daudet in his " Lc Brise-Cailloux, 1815," 
tells a story of a plan to take Napoleon to 
America, as follows: When, after Waterloo, 
Napoleon went to the island of Aix, on the eve 

of his surrender to the English, a ship captain, 
174 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

Vildieu, proposed to take him to America, 
through the English lines. Vildieu was an 
ardent Bonapartist, an excellent sailor, having 
made a special study of sailing small craft on 
the open ocean, — was sure of his boat and was 
ready to take it to the end of the world. The 
Emperor heard the whole of his story, 
walked up and down in silence, then looking at 
the ocean for some minutes, shook his head and 
said no. The plan did not inspire confidence 
and he preferred surrendering to the English. 
Some months later, Vildieu, to show that his 
plan was a good one, on the same boat that he 
had offered to Napoleon, sailed to America with 
two men, one his son. At the end of six weeks, 
he landed at Halifax, much to the surprise of 
the crew of a frigate, near which he anchored. 
Long years afterwards, the son, then an old 
man, told Daudet the story. How much truth 
is there in it? At all events it confirms the old 
tradition that Napoleon really considered this 
and other projects for taking refuge in the 
United States. 



XV 

Royalist Exiles 

Hyde de Neuville came to the United 
States in 1807, a royalist exile, and spent seven 
years in this country. His first thought was 
to establish an agricultural settlement, and 
with this in view he travelled through the 
country. In his letters (pp. 450, etc., of the 
first volume of his Memoirs, Paris, 1880) he 
speaks of the country as he saw it, of the 
boundless forests, the virgin soil, the industry 
of the people, of his visits to the Indians in 
Western New York, of the good work among 
them of the French missionaries during the rule 
of France, and their neglect later on ; living 
on the allowance paid by the Holland Land 
Company, he found them little like the war- 
like savages described by Chateaubriand. He 
went as far West as Tennessee, to visit the 
colonies established by Church and Dupont de 
Nemours. He corresponded with his country- 
176 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

women, Mmc. dc Noailles, Mme. de Mouchy, 

Mrac. dc Damas, Mmc. dc Rochcmore, Mme. 

de Montcchenu, and Mme. dc Pastorct, 

and the Princess de Tremoille. To the 

last he wrote that if the Americans were 

wise, they would in time dictate laws to 

both worlds, the Old and the New, and equal 

in power the great nations of Europe. He 

thought thirty or forty years would see this 

result, and if other Presidents had followed 

the example of Washington, whom he praises 

in the strongest terms, perhaps it would not 

have taken a century to realize his aspirations 

for the future of American greatness. He 

formed many strong friendships with the 

Cftfgers, the Wilkes, the Churches, the Simonds, 

the Roulets, and with the Moreaus, the general 

then in exile from the enmity of Napoleon. 

Opposed as they had been in politics in France, 

in America the French exiles met on a common 

ground of love for P' ranee. A brother, after 

two years of rigorous imprisonment in France, 

joined him in New York; in the interval he 

had studied medicine and became in 1810 

" Doctor " Neuville. He established in New 
12 177 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

York a school for the children of the families 
exiled in 1800 from St. Domingo. Among 
them was the family Ricord, whose son, edu- 
cated in this school, after his return to France 
became the celebrated Dr. Ricord, and in his 
house there later on welcomed his benefactor. 
The State of New York appropriated money 
for the school and Hyde de Ncuville published 
a monthly literary paper to earn more for it, 
the Journal of the Hermit of the Passaic, for 
near New Brunswick, New Jersey, he made his 
home, tried farming, and saw his brother mar- 
ried to the daughter of the Marquis d'Espin- 
ville, an exile from Havana. Soon afterwards 
General Moreau left his peaceful home at Mor- 
risville, Pennsylvania, to return to Eurupe 
and fall in battle against France and Napo- 
leon. Hyde de Neuville had opposed the offer 
made by Moreau to serve with the allies against 
France. Royalist as he was, Neuville was 
always a patriotic Frenchman, and frankly 
wrote to Louis XVIII that he thought Moreau 
had not taken the right course. 

Returning to France at the call of the Due 

d'Angoulcme, Hyde de Neuville received very 

178 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

flattering letters from Dewitt Clinton, then 
mayor, later governor, and from the " Eco- 
nomical Society " of New York, for his services 
as founder and secretary of that useful body. 
In France and through Europe he resumed all 
his old activity in support of the royal cause, 
represented it in the French Legislature 
after the fall of Napoleon, and in 1816 was 
sent to the United States as French Minister. 
Welcomed alike by the public authorities and 
by his old friends and by the pupils of the 
school he had founded, after a short stay on 
his farm at New Brunswick, he went to Wash- 
ington, where he was warmly received by 
President Monroe, whose acquaintance he had 
made when Monroe was American Minister 
in Paris. He visited Madison and Jefferson 
at their homes in Virginia, and his correspond- 
ence with the Due de Richelieu, the French 
Minister of Foreign Affairs (his wife was a 
Montcalm, another suggestion of France in 
America), is full of details of their recollec- 
tions of their stay in Paris as American 
ministers. 

Much of his time was taken up in keeping 
179 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

watch over the French exiles living in the 
United States. Joseph Bonaparte was the 
head of a large body of French exiles, busy in 
scheming for Napoleon. Dupont de Nemours 
asked help for a very different body of French, 
refugees from St. Domingo, and Hyde de 
Neuville gave the French Consuls instruc- 
tions in regard to them. In New York 
there were Regnault, Quinet, and Real; in 
Philadelphia Joseph Bonaparte, Grouchy, 
Clausel, Gamier de Saintes; in New Or- 
leans, Lefebvre Desnouettes, while a colony 
was established on the shores of the Ohio. 
The Due de Richelieu and the King both ap- 
proved his sending a portrait of Napoleon, 
found in the French Legation at Washington, 
to Joseph Bonaparte, then living at Borden- 
town, whence it returned later to the legation. 
Many of the French exiles fled from France to 
avoid the punishment to which they had been 
condemned by the Courts for political offences, 
but the French authorities were apparently 
only too glad to be rid of them, and the Cnited 
States gave a peaceful home alike to Girondists 

and Jacobins, to Royalists and Imperialists, to 

ISO 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

men of any and of no political opinions, as 
long as they were peaceful residents and good 
citizens. While there were some unsuccessful 
schemes set on foot in the United States to 
release Napoleon from St. Helena, Neuville 
wrote home that Grouchy, Lefebvre Desnou- 
ettes and Lallemand and Clausel were all loyal 
to the existing French government. Clausel 
wrote of the misfortunes of the French officers 
in exile in the United States, and suggested 
that help be given them to settle in Havana 
and Porto Rico. Some of them, however, re- 
turned to France and became high officers 
under the more liberal policy of Louis Philippe. 
The " Conventionnel Lakanal " was reported 
by Neuville in 1817, as an agent of Joseph 
Bonaparte in a plan to make the latter King 
of Mexico, part of Burr's conspiracy. Just 
before leaving Washington, to return to 
France, he obtained from the government there, 
in 1818, means to continue his " Economical 
School " in New York, for the children of the 
impoverished refugees from St. Domingo, and 
even to help some of them to return to France. 

He himself went there, and after a short stay 
181 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

in Paris again returned temporarily to Wash- 
ington, to complete his negotiations with the 
government of the United States. Finally 
recalled to France, he found his friends, 
among them Chateaubriand, in the govern- 
ment, and later on he became a minister 
of state under Louis Philippe. Living until 
1857, he was always fond of dwelling on his 
American life, as exile, and as minister. His 
active participation in the relief of his country- 
men in exile here was without regard to dif- 
ferences of political opinions, and his name 
figures with honor in the writings of Chateau- 
briand and Lamartine, as that of a Frenchman 
who, both as a private citizen and as a minister, 
appreciated this country and its welcome. 



XVI 

Balzac's Story of a French Exile 

Balzac in " Les Celibataires, un Menage 
de Gar^on " (vol. ii of " Scenes de la vie de 
Province ") makes his hero (and a great scamp 
he is) Captain Philippe Bridau, who went from 
Saint Cyr in 1813, became a sub-lieutenant in 
a cavalry regiment, later a lieutenant, for 
gallantry in saving his colonel in an affair of 
outpost duty, was made captain at the battle 
of Fere Champenoise, and ordnance officer by 
the emperor, got the cross at Montereau ; re- 
fused to serve under the Bourbons; in 1814 
rejoined the emperor at Lyons, accompanied 
him to the Tuileries, was made chef d'escadron 
of the Guards Dragoons, wounded at Waterloo, 
where he gained the cross of the Legion of 
Honor, was protected by Marshal Davoust, and 
was put on half pay. After the restoration, 
he joined General Lallemand in the United 

States, and cooperated in founding the Champs 
183 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

d'Asile, supported by one of the most curious 
mystifications known as a national subscription. 
His mother hail given him ten thousand francs 
on sailing from Havre; no sooner in New York 
than he drew on her for one thousand francs, 
having lost everything at Champs d'Asile. Re- 
turned to France in 1819, ruined by his mis- 
fortunes in Texas and his stay in New York, 
where speculation and individualism were 
carried to the highest pitch ; where the brutality 
of interests reached cynicism; where the isolated 
man looked only for himself; where politeness 
did not exist. — Bridau. who cared for only 
one person, himself, became brutal, intemper- 
ate, selfish, impolite ; misery and suffering had 
depraved him. New York had taken away his 
least scruples in morality. Bronzed by his 
stay in Texas, he had a sharp and short way 
of making himself respected in New York. 
The idea of the conquest of Texas by the hand- 
ful of the imperial army that went there to 
establish the Champs d'Asile. was a fine one, 
for in spite o\' its failure. Texas is a republic 
full of future greatness. Liberalism under the 

Restoration was pure egotism; it helped noth- 
184 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

ing to try to refound the empire in America. 
The liberal chief's soon saw that they were help- 
ing Louis XVIII by exporting from France the 
glorious remains of its armies, and they aban- 
doned the most devoted, ai'dcnt enthusiasts, 
who were the first to go. 

Bridau was welcomed on his return from 
Texas and Champs d'Asile as a " soldier- 
laborer." That was the title for a deluge of 
engravings, clocks, bronzes, etc., a sort of 
tribute to Napoleon and his brave soldiers, who 
figured in many plays of the time. It yielded 
a fortune, and to this da}' the " soldier- 
laborer " is found in country homes through 
France in one or other of these devices. 

It was always possible to threaten the 
Liberals with the story of the blunders in 
Texas, of the waste and pilfering of the 
national subscription started for the Champs 
d'Asile. 

Balzac thus perpetuates the story of the 
French " Champs d'Asile " in Texas and its 
failure. 



XVII 

French Members of the American 
Philosophical Society 

In 1768 Buffon was elected a member of 
the American Philosophical Society. This 
was a genuine tribute to his fame, for in those 
colonial days the relations of that young 
society, the outgrowth of Franklin's Junto, 
were close with the Mother Country. In that 
year Sir William Johnson and General Gage 
followed Buffon on its rolls. Mr. T. Penn 
sent to the secretary, Provost Smith, Mas- 
kelyne's Observations on Venus, and he was 
elected in 1771 ; Du Simitiere followed, a 
Frenchman still known by his antiquarian col- 
lections, and who no doubt brought some 
French spirit to the meetings. 

In 1772 Le Rey, of the Academy of Sciences 
in Paris, a friend and correspondent of Frank- 
lin, was elected, along with Lieutenant Adye 

of the Royal Artillery, Lieutenant Hutchins 
186 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

of the Sixtieth (Royal American) Regiment, 
and Captain John Montresor of the engineers. 
In 1774 Franklin presented Buffon's works, a 
gift from the author, and Lavoisier's, with a 
letter from the author, and queries from 
Condorcet, and they were elected, along with 
noteworthy men from London, Barbadoes, and 
Jamaica, — often in acknowledgment of works 
presented. In 1775 Franklin, presiding, pre- 
sented a number of scientific works, and from 
the outset he was active in thus securing con- 
tributions; one of them was an English book, 
by his friend Sir John Pringle; then fol- 
lowed the interruption of the war, and when 
meetings were resumed, among the newly- 
elected members was Gerard de Rayneval, 
French minister; and a bound volume of the 
Transactions was presented to him and received 
with expression of his intention to forward the 
views of the Society in America and in France ; 
he attended a meeting and agreed to forward 
to Buffon the thanks of the Society for his 
superb present of his works. In 1780 Luzerne, 
the French minister, was elected and attended, 

and in 1781 Lafayette was elected; at a later 

187 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

meeting Barbe Marbois, recently elected, pre- 
sided ; and " ten pounds of the best kind of raw 
silk produced in Pennsylvania was ordered 
to be sent to Lyons, there to be wrought 
in the most elegant manner, and presented to 
her Most Christian Majesty as a mark of very 
high respect." This was following the prece- 
dent set in-- 1770, when the Society for Pro- 
moting the Culture of Silk in Pennsylvania 
sent Franklin a quantity to be presented 
to the Queen of England and to the Penns, 
and in 1772, when it sent him forty-five 
pounds of raw silk, in acknowledgment of 
the trouble he had taken in the business. 
In 1783, on the motion of Jefferson, 
the Philosophical Society ordered that Itit- 
tenhouse should make an orrery to be 
presented to the King of France. In 1784 
Vergennes was elected, and later in the year, 
Lafayette, by special appointment, " enter- 
tained the members with an account of the 
invisible power called Animal Magnetism, lately 
discovered by Mesmer," and later on Marbois 
presented the report of the King of France's 

commissioners on the subject. In 1785 three 

188 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

volumes of the Proceedings of the Royal 
French Academy, and " a very curious elec- 
trical apparatus," were presented through Mr. 
Marbois, by Dr. Noel of Paris. In 1786 among 
the members elected were the Due dc Roche- 
foucauld, the Marquis de Condorcet, Charles 
the aeronaut, Cabanis ; in 1787, Otto, French 
Minister to the United States, and Cadet de 
Vaux; books were received from Belin 
de Villeneuve, Moreau de St. Mery, Marbois, 
Brissot de Warville; later in the year was 
presented Quesnay de Beaurepaire's account 
of the Academy of Sciences and Belles Lettres 
established by him at Richmond, in Virginia ; 
Legau was elected in recognition, no doubt, 
of his vineyards at Spring Mills, Penn- 
sylvania. In 1791 Duponceau and Ternant, 
Minister from France, were elected; in 1792 
Mathurin de la Forest and Palisot de Beauvois, 
and the latter attended and submitted a paper 
on a botanical subject; in 1792 Legau pre- 
sented his work on Surinam, and later St. 
George a paper on the Diseases of St. Domingo 
and hot climates in general ; and Legau one 

on Vine Culture in Pennsylvania. The list of 
189 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

distinguished Frenchmen who were members of 
the Philosophical Society was largely increased 
after Franco became an ally in the struggle 
with Groat Britain. Many of the Frenchmen 
who served here were elected] ami nearly all of 
its diplomat ic and consular representatives 
of the times Lafayette and Chastellux, Otto, 
and Luzerne, and D'Angeville, and Vergennes ; 
Guichen and Rochefoucauld and Franklin's 
friends, Le Yeillard and Cadet de Yaux. 
and Cabanis, and Lo Roux ; in 1789 St. 
Joan do Crevecoeur (hotter known as Hector 
St. John, the name under which he wrote his 
"Farmer in Pennsylvania"), Moreau de St. 
Mery, Brissot; in 1791 Gallatin, and Du- 
ponceau; in 1798 Valentini; in 1796 Roche- 
foucauld Liancourt, Grandpr6, Le Compte, 
Adet, French Minister to the United States, 
Talleyrand Perigord; in 1797 Volney; in 
1800 Dupont de Nemours; in 1808 .Uoume; 
in 1803 Delambre; in 1806 Destutt de 
Tracy; in 1807 Lasteyrie; in 1809 
Michaux; in 1811 Vauquelin; in 1817 
Lesueur, Delametrie, and Deleuze; in 1829 

Hyde de Neuvillc, Pougens, Jomard, and 
190 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

Remusat. In 1793 money was subscribed 
towards the expense of Micbaux's Western 
journey of discoveries; Citizen Genet, French 
Minister, presented a letter and pamphlet on 
the French reform of the Calendar ; and Doctor 
Nassey addressed the Society in French on 
botany; later Fauchet, French Minister to the 
United States, presented a description of the 
New System of Weights and Measures adopted 
by the French Republic; M. Lercbours, lately 
from Paris, gave an account of the late curious 
and useful discoveries and inventions relating 
to the arts, made in France since the commence- 
ment of the Revolution, with a number of 
pamphlets on the same subject; in 1795 
Moreau de St. Mery presented some curious 
articles from St. Domingo and a medal of 
Louis XVI, July 17, 1789, and later a silver 
medal of Louis XV, struck on the occasion of 
the peace of 1763; he seems to have been a 
pretty steady attendant at the meetings. In 
1796 Doctor Grassi, " late of Bordeaux, now 
of Philadelphia," Rochefoucauld Liancourt, 
Le Comte, Le Fessier de Grandpre, and 

Citizen Adct, Minister Plenipotentiary of 
191 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

the French Republic to the United States, 
were elected at the same meeting, and Grassi, 
Adct, and Liancourt attended several subse- 
quent meetings ; later Lerebours, " late of 
Paris, now of Philadelphia," Larocque, and M. 
Talleyrand Perigord were present ;in 1797 Vol- 
ney attended meetings; he was present when St. 
Mery presented " from the author," Adet's 
" Doctrine of Phlogistique and the Decomposi- 
tion of Water " in French ; then, in 1800, the 
Society received Dupont de Nemours' book, 
" Philosophic de l'Univers," and thanks were 
voted and delivered by Jefferson ; and later 
more papers were received from Dupont, yet 
the committee to which one of them was re- 
ferred, reported that although ingenious, it was 
not of sufficient importance to publish, but 
later on the publication was ordered of his 
translation of Baudry de Lozicre's paper on 
Animal Cotton. 

In 1803 the National Institute of France 
promised, as successors of the French Academy, 
to resume correspondence and exchanges ; Gen- 
eral Toussard presented a paper on proving 
cannon; the library was enriched by the nu- 
192 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

merons volumes of " L'Encyclopcdic." In 
1805 Dupont dc Nemours sent from Paris De 
Candolle's " Essai sur les proprietes medicinales 
des plantes," and many French books Avere re- 
ceived from other sources, some by purchase, 
many as gifts, from Hassler the volumes neces- 
sary to complete the Transactions of the French 
Academy of Science, which Franklin left to it. 

It is a noteworthy fact that Franklin's 
legacy to the Philosophical Society was ninety- 
one volumes of the History of the Royal Acad- 
emy of Sciences of France, and that later the 
Society bought from Franklin's library many 
of his French scientific works, e.g., Bailly's 
History of Astronomy, those of Condaminc, De 
Luc, Dcsagulier, Berthelot, De Saussure, La- 
voisier, De la Lande, as well as a number of 
serial volumes of French scientific societies. 
Thus was begun that collection of the Transac- 
tions, etc., of French scientific societies that now 
form so important a part of the library. 

In 1807 Jefferson presented pamphlets from 
the authors, De Lastcyrie on Cotton and 
Cossigny on Sugar. In 1809 Michaux ob- 

13 193 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

tained the completion to date of the French 
scientific journals, and imported for the Society 
the works of Brongniart, Bron chart, Hauy, 
and Berthelot. In 1817 the election of Lesueur 
brought a French naturalist who made frequent 
communication of his researches ; he was con- 
stant in attendance at the meetings, and took 
part in the election of Desmarest, Blainville, 
and Latreille of Paris in 1819; he served dili- 
gentty both before and after his Western visit 
with Maclure; in 1823 he was present when the 
Society elected Joseph Count de Survilliers and 
Lucien Prince of Canino. In 1824 Lafa} r ette 
was received by the Society with marked honors. 
In 1825 Charles Bonaparte attended and he and 
Lesueur and Duponceau recalled the days of 
frequent attendance by French members and 
visitors. Charles Bonaparte made donations to 
the library, and Lesueur gave his drawings 
from the fossil bones in the cabinet. In 1829 
Hyde de Ncuville, then French Minister to the 
United States, was elected a member; and 
Pougens; in 1830 M. A. Julicn ; in 1831 Louis 
Philippe, King of the French; in 1833 the 

members of the Society subscribed towards a 
194 






IN THE UNITED STATES 

statue of Cuvier, and sent the money in the 
name of the Society to the French Academy ; 
in 1833 M. Nicollet "of Paris, then in 
Georgia," reported his progress in scientific ob- 
servations in the Southern States; in 1834 the 
death of Lafayette was formally announced 
and due action taken. In 1837 the death of 
Barbe Marbois in his ninety-fifth year was 
announced and Duponceau was appointed to 
prepare a memoir of him. He had been Na- 
poleon's Minister of Finance. Other notable 
Frenchmen elected were Larrey, the great 
French surgeon, Roux de Rochelle, Guizot, De 
Tocqueville, Poussin, the French Minister to 
the United States, Pouchet, Michel Chevalier, 
Cauchey, Brown-Sequard, Durand, Elie de 
Beaumont, Milne-Edwards, St. Claire-De- 
ville, J. B. Dumas, Verneuil, Lesquereux, 
Renan, Boucher des Perthes, Gasparin, De 
Ronge, Linant, Mariette, Lartet, Carlier, Leon 
Say, Broca, Viollet le Due, Claude Jannet, 
Paul Leroy Beaulieu, Rosny, Pasteur, Hove- 
lacque, Levasseur, Duruy, Nadaillac, Reville, 
Topinard, Taine, Berthelot, George Bertin, 
Delambre, Delage, Becquerel, Darboux, Mas- 
195 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

pero, Poincare. Thus from the early election 
of BufFon, with the later welcome to the French 
who served in the American war, the hearty 
reception of French refugees and exiles, down 
to our own day, with its representatives of 
French science and letters, the records of the 
Society show how largely its membership was 
recruited by notable Frenchmen. At the elec- 
tion of 1907, the Society chose M. Jusserand, 
the French ambassador to the United States, 
and a scholarly man of letters. 

Pontgibaud says that " Duportail told him 
the French refugees found Philadelphia an ark 
of safety. Constitutionalists, Conventional- 
ists, Thermidorians, Fructidorians, as well as 
Royalists and Girondists, met on common 
ground; Moreau de St. Mery kept a sta- 
tioner's shop, where they met to discuss the 
future of France ; Noailles, Liancourt, Tal- 
leyrand speculated in stocks and land; the 
French cook who supplied the Due d'Orleans 
and his brothers, forbade Volney coming to his 
little restaurant while they were there." 

In 1844 Doctor Dunglison delivered an 

eulogium on Duponceau. It followed in due 
196 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

course that on Franklin by Provost Smith, 
that on Rittenhouse by Doctor Rush, that on 
Doctor Wistar by Chief Justice Tilghman, that 
on Tilghman by Duponceau, and that on Jef- 
ferson by Nicholas Biddle. Born on the west 
coast of France in 1760, Duponceau learned 
English from the soldiers of an Irish regiment 
stationed in the town, and later Italian in the 
same way. Unwillingly he took the tonsure, 
but soon gave up holy orders, and went to Pari3 
to seek his fortune. Through Beaumarchais he 
entered the service of Steuben as secretary, and 
with him landed in Portsmouth, New Hamp- 
shire, in 1777. As a captain of infantry of 
the line of the Army of the Revolution he re- 
ceived a pension until the day of his death. 
After leaving the army, in 1781, owing to ill 
health, he became a citizen of Pennsylvania, 
and settled in Philadelphia. He was secre- 
tary of Robert R. Livingston, Secretary for 
Foreign Affairs, studied law and was admitted 
to the bar in 1785, and became one of its ac- 
knowledged leaders. In 1827 he was elected 
a member of the French Institute, in recogni- 
tion of his linguistic studies, and in 1835 was 
197 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

awarded the prize founded by Volney, for his 
Memoir on the Indian languages of North 
America. He spent time and money in an un- 
successful effort to introduce the production 
and manufacture of silk in this country. 
Elected to the Philosophical Society in 1791, 
he became a vice-president in 1816, and presi- 
dent in 1827. Among his bequests to the 
Society were twent}^-one volumes of the 
Moniteur from 1789 to 1809. 

Talleyrand read a " Memoir concerning 
the Commercial Relations of the United States 
with England," at the National Institute, the 
15th Germinal, in the Year V, to which was 
added " An Essay upon the Advantages to be 
derived from New Colonies in the existing cir- 
cumstances," read at the Institute, the 15th 
Messidor in the Year V, with Notes, in the 
month of Ventose, Year VII, — published in 
London for Longman, 1806, in a pamphlet of 
87 pages. In it there are a good many refer- 
ences to his visit here. " In every part of 
America through which I have travelled, I did 
not meet a single Frenchman who did not find 

himself a stranger. It is a novel sight to the 
198 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

traveller, who, setting out from a principal 
city, where society is in perfection, passes in 
succession through all the degrees of civiliza- 
tion and industry, which he finds constantly 
growing weaker and weaker, until in a few 
days, he arrives at misshapen and rude cabins, 
formed of the trunks of trees lately cut down. 
It would require a French establishment in 
America to counteract the indolence and want 
of native character. 

" Have we not seen of late years, since there 
have been political opinions in France, men 
of all parties embark together, and go to run 
the same risks upon the uninhabited banks of 
the Scioto? 

" Louisiana remains French, although it has 
been under the domination of the Spaniards for 
more than thirty years, and in Canada, al- 
though in the power of the English for the 
same length of time, the colonists of these two 
countries were Frenchmen, they are so still." 

In Mr. Whitelaw Reid's introduction to the 

Due de Broglie's edition of the Memoirs of 

Talleyrand, (there could not be better sponsors 

to their authenticity, in spite of the suspicion 
199 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

thrown on them by the fact that M. de Bacourt 
was their custodian,) he says: "Talleyrand 
spent many months in the United States soon 
after the establishment of their independence, 
in which France had aided ; and while a Revolu- 
tion, stimulated in part by the American 
example, was in progress in his own land, he 
found in his recollections of his American visit 
almost nothing suggested by either event, and 
nothing concerning the great man, then Chief 
Magistrate of the country which gave him hos- 
pitality. His lack of sympathy with republican- 
ism, whether in the United States or in France, 
explains the one omission ; and Washing- 
ton's refusal to receive him, explains the other. 
Lord Lansdowne had given him a warm letter 
of introduction to Washington, setting forth 
that Talleyrand was really in exile because, 
although a bishop, he had desired to promote 
the general freedom of worship, and eulogizing 
him for having sacrificed his ambition in the 
Church to his devotion to principle. Wash- 
ington possibly had his own views as to the 
extent to which Talleyrand's exile was due to 

his high religious principles. Hamilton's in- 
200 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

fluence, always great, was joined to Lord Lans- 
downe's eulogy, but both were unavailing. The 
refusal to receive the French exile, however, 
was quietly put upon political grounds." Fol- 
lowing his expulsion from England by Pitt, 
Talleyrand naturally had little praise for 
either Pitt or Washington. Of his later 
dealings with the United States, Mr. Reid 
says : " Talleyrand gave notice to the 
American Ministers Plenipotentiary in Paris 
that they must buy peace or leave the 
country. When the American Commission- 
ers resented his demand for a bribe of two 
hundred and fifty thousand dollars for him- 
self and a bigger one called a loan for the 
Directory, his representative naively said, 
' Don't you know that everything is bought in 
Paris? Do you dream that you can get on 
with this government without paying your 
way ? ' This from the man who had been 
honored with Hamilton's friendship, and who 
shrewdly said, shortly after the adoption of 
the Constitution, ' that was the true date of 
the foundation of the United States; it was 

the real sheet-anchor of American independ- 
201 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

ence,' was a cynical measure of the men in office 
under it." 

In his story figure the names of his fel- 
low-exiles, men of a very different type, 
Noailles, who fell in action near Havana fight- 
ing for France, Brissot de Warville, who died 
on the scaffold, Barbe Marbois, French Consul 
in Philadelphia, and others. 

In his narrative he tells the story of meet- 
ing Benedict Arnold, just as Talleyrand was 
leaving for America, and in vain asking him 
for letters of introduction to his friends in 
America, and Arnold's characteristic reply : 
" I am the only American who cannot give you 
letters for his own country." In Philadelphia 
he met Casanove and Huidekoper, agents of 
the Holland Land Company, and travelled with 
the latter inland. He could not have had a 
better guide. He speaks of the two winters 
spent in Philadelphia and New York, and 
praises Hamilton as on a par with Pitt or Fox 
or other distinguished European statesmen. 
He speaks in high praise of the enterprise of 
American merchants and says that in 1794 he 

witnessed the return of the first American 

202 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

trading expedition to the East Indies, and in 
the following year fourteen American vessels 
started for India from different ports in order 
to obtain a share of the enormous profits 
secured by the English company. He spent 
thirty months in the United States, keeping up 
close correspondence with Mme. de Stael, to 
whom on his return he owed his introduction 
to Barras, and through him his relations with 
Napoleon. It was before the National Insti- 
tute, organized in 1795, on the foundation of 
the old academies abolished in 1792, to which 
he was elected a member of the section of Moral 
and Political Sciences, that he read his paper 
on " The Commercial Intercourse of England 
with the United States," published in its 
volume of Proceedings of 1799, along with a 
second, on " Advantages to be Derived from 
New Colonies," which he says, attracted a cer- 
tain notice. These are the results of his stay 
in the United States, and have value and inter- 
est on that account. 

In the collection of the Philosophical Society 
there is a MS. of Mr. Samuel Breck, dated 
1862, giving an account of the early raem- 
203 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

bers of the Society he had known ; Mr. 
Breek was then in his ninety-first year. He 
was born in 1771 in Boston; he had become a 
member of the Society in 1838, and died in 
186'~. shortly after writing, at the request 
of Doctor Bache, then president of the 
Society, his memoranda. They have the per- 
sonal note of actual acquaintance with those 
whose names are now historical and of others 
who by their writings have an interest as mem- 
bers of this venerable Society. He says: 
" Talleyrand came to Philadelphia in 179-t 
to reside there until France is at peace. He 
took the oath of allegiance to the State ot' 
Pennsylvania. He listened to Hamilton's 
argument in the United States Court on the 
constitutionality of the Carriage Tax law. He 
equipped himself in full hunting-suit for a 
visit to the then Western frontier, and saw 
there only the destruction of the forests, just 
as in our hardy fishermen he saw only idlers. 
Yet both sea and forest were then beginning 
to earn sums that laid the foundation of our 
wealth. 

** Yolney was another refugee from the vio- 
804 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

lcnce of the French Revolution. He taught 
French to a few pupils whose liberal pay con- 
tributed to his support; he made an offer of 
marriage, which was rejected. Perhaps this 
accounted, in part at least, for his haughty 
and morose nature, jealous of the least appear- 
ance of slight or neglect ; and presuming much 
upon his celebrity as a writer, he judged 
Americans in his conversations and publications 
as an inferior people, unworthy of renown and 
wanting in morals and republican purity. 
Washington, in his opinion, would never have 
been more than a colonel in the French army ; 
he condemned the growing luxury in America, 
and anticipated a visit of the Algerine pirates 
to levy tribute on our ports. 

" Brissot dc Warvillc was equally hostile to 
the growing luxury and refinement of the cities 
of America, as a sign of decay of republican 
simplicit} r . Alike they condemned American 
manners, climate, food, and both longed for 
the return to France and to the honors await- 
ing them. Brissot, however, was guillotined 
in 1793. 

" Rochefoucauld Liancourt took his exile and 
205 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

poverty in very good spirits, and his account 
of his travels is kindly towards the New World. 

" Louis Philippe came to Philadelphia in 
1796, and bore his enforced exile good- 
naturedly. He painted a miniature of Miss 
Willing and was said to have asked her to 
marry him. He was joined in Philadelphia 
by his younger brothers, the Dues de Mont- 
pensier and Beaujolais. They made a jour- 
ney on horseback through Pennsylvania and 
New York and to the Falls of Niagara." 

Mr. Breck mentions the fact that Gouver- 
neur Morris secured for Mrs. Robert Morris 
an annuity of sixteen hundred dollars out of 
the lands bought by Le Ray de Chaumont, and 
this was her sole support until her death. 

Mr. Breck spent four years at a military 

school at Loreze in the south of France, and 

in 1787 on his arrival in Paris on his way 

home to America made the acquaintance of 

Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, the author of 

the " Letters from an American Farmer," 

which did much to enlist foreign interest in 

America. His book, published in Paris in 

1787, covers his personal experiences as a 
206 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

farmer in Pennsylvania from 1770 to 1786. 
Through him Breck made the acquaintance of 
Brissot de Warville, who later took refuge 
from the French Revolution in Philadelphia, 
and returned American hospitality by violent 
diatribes against American morals and man- 
ners. " Brissot came in 1788 and had little 
good to say in his book, published on his return 
to France, as to our future. Chastellux, on the 
other hand, found only good to say of the 
people and the country whose independence he 
as an officer of Rochambeau's army had helped 
to secure ; his ' Travels in the United States ' 
are of value and interest as a contemporary 
record of the country. His tribute to Wash- 
ington is still often quoted, for it gives a clear 
and vivid picture of the great American, as 
Chastellux saw and knew him, both in war and 
in peace. Chastellux was elected a member of 
the Philosophical Society in 1781, and died a 
field marshal in 1788." 

Breck's Recollections, published in Philadel- 
phia in 1877, give a further picture of the 
time. " In Philadelphia all the distinguished 
emigrants from France took up their abode, — 
207 J 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

Talleyrand, his companion, Beaumais, Vicomte 
dc Noailles, the Due de Rochefoucauld Lian- 
court, Volney, and subsequently Louis Philippe 
and his brothers, the Dues de Montpensier 
and BeaujoTais, and later General Moreau. 
Talleyrand and his companion, Beaumais, 
equipped themselves in the costume of back- 
woodsmen, with rifles, guns, and hunting-shirts, 
for their Western tour. Volney was a 
timid, peevish, sour-tempered man. Washing- 
ton hated free-thinkers and as President de- 
clined to notice the French emigrants, and to 
get rid of Volney, on his request at Mount 
Vernon for a circular letter of introduction, 
gave him one that Volney thought too feeble 
for his exalted merit, hence the manner in which 
he speaks of that great man. De Noailles had 
been in America with Rochambeau; his sister 
was the wife of Lafayette. His form was per- 
fect — a fine face, tall, graceful, the first 
amateur dancer of the age, and of very pleas- 
ing manners. He became a trader and 
speculator, — every day at the coffee-house or 
exchange, busy, holding his bank book in one 



208 



IN THE UNITED STATES 

hand and a broker or merchant with the other, 
while he drove his bargains." 

Among the scientific men brought to this 
country in 1827 by William Maclure, to help 
out his plan of a geological survey of the 
United States, were a number of French- 
men. One of them was Charles Lesueur, 
a French naturalist and draughtsman, who 
drew some of the engravings for Say's 
Conchology, had been employed in the Jar- 
din des Plantes of Paris, sent to it many 
reports of his American explorations, and con- 
tributed papers to the American Philosoph- 
ical Society and to the Academy of Natural 
Sciences, of both of which he was an active 
member. He taught in the scientific school 
founded at New Harmony, Indiana, of which 
Maclure was part founder with Robert Owen; 
later he returned to Philadelphia, where he 
gave lessons in drawing and painting, and con- 
tinued his scientific researches; these were re- 
warded by appointment as Director of the 
Museum of Natural History of Havre, his 
native city, and he died there soon after his 

return to France. A sympathetic memoir of 
14 209 



FRENCH COLONISTS AND EXILES 

him was recently printed by the Society of 
Americanists of Paris. 

Another of Maclure's scientific corps was 
Phignepul d'Arusmont, and still another, Mme. 
Fretageot. Under them a large school was 
established, on Owen's plan of teaching both 
useful arts and mathematics and natural his- 
tory, Lesueur taking an active part in the 
work. For many years New Harmony re- 
mained the chief scientific and educational 
centre in the West, influencing the country and 
the people in many ways, largely owing to the 
presence there of Frenchmen of science and 
their instruction. 



W%2f$ W%gW IW ^O^ WQf% 

cerate Hrata errata e^raK* e^rate 



Appendix A 

Bibliography 

Jeffreys: History of the French Dominions in 

America. London, 1761; folio. 
D'Anville: Memoires pour la Carte intitulee: 

Canada, Louisiane, etc. Paris, 1756; 4°. 
Lescarbot: Histoire de la Nouvelle France. 

Paris, 1618. 
Dussieux: La Canada sous la domination fran- 

caise. Paris, 1862. 
Poussin: La puissance Americaine. Paris, 1848. 
Lozere: Histoire des Etats Unis. Paris, 1845. 
Carlier: Histoire du peuple Americain. Paris, 

1864* 
Tocqueville: La Democratic en Amerique. Paris, 

1838-40. 
Laboulaye: Histoire politique des Etats Unis. 

Paris, 1855. 
Le Page du Pratz: Hist, de la Louisiane. Paris, 

1758. 



An answer to the work of Tocqueville. 
211 



APPENDIX A 



Vergennes: Mem. Hist, et polit. sur la Louisiane. 
Paris, 1802. 

Milfort: Voyages dans la Louisiane. Paris, 
1802. 

Barbe Marbois: Hist, de la Louisiane. Paris, 
1829. 

Monette: History of the Discovery and Settle- 
ment of the Valley of the Mississippi; 7 
vols. New York, 1846. 

Chotteau: Les Francais en Amerique (1775-83). 
Paris, 1876. 

Gaffarel: Hist, de la Floride francaise. Paris, 
1876. 

Rameau: La colonie canadienne de Detroit. 
Paris, 1881. 

Maze: Role de la France dans la Republique des 
Etats Unis. Paris, 1879- 

Margry: Deeouvertes et Establissements des 
Francais dans l'ouest et dans le sud de 
1* Amerique septentrionale. 1614-1754; 6 
vols. Paris, 1888. 

Brissot de Warville: New Travels in the United 
States, 1788. Translated by Chas. Brock- 
den Brown. Philadelphia, 1804. 

Volney's Travels in the United States: Translated 
" by his friend " Chas. Brockden Brown. 
Philadelphia, 1 804. 

Perrin du Lac: Voyage dans les deux Louisianes. 
Lyon, 1801. 

212 



APPENDIX A 

Vicomte de Noailles: Marins et soldats P'rancais 
en Amerique pendant la Guerre de l'lnde- 
pendance des Etats Unis (1778-1783). 
Paris, Perrin, 1893. 

Quesnay de Beaurepaire: Virginia Historical 
Society, vol. ii, N. S., by R. H. Gains; pp. 
166, etc. 

Love and Adventures of M. [Louis Lebeau] Du 
Portail, late Major-General in the Armies of 
the United States, with incidents of the late 
Count Pulauski. Boston, 1799; New Haven, 
1813. 

The French Regime in Wisconsin, 1634-1718. 
Wisconsin State Historical Society, vols. 16 
and 17, 1902 and 1906. 

Chevalier, Michel : Lettres sur l'Amerique du 
Nord. Paris, 1836. 

Franche, Gabriel: Narrative of a Voyage to the 
Northwest Coast of America in the Years 
1811-12-13-14. Translated by J. V. Hunt- 
ingdon. New York, 1854. 

Beau jour, Felix de: Sketch of the United States 
from 1800 to 1810, with statistical tables. 
Translated from the French by William 
Walton. London, 1814. 

Bossu: Travels through Louisiana. Translated 
from the French by John Reinhold Forster. 
London, 1771. 

De Fonpertuis: Les Etats Unis. Paris, 1854. 
313 



APPENDIX A 

Brissot, de Warville, J. P. : Nouveau voyage dans 
les Etats Unis fait en 1788; 3 vols. Paris, 
1791. 

Id. : Translation, with his Life ; 2 vols. Lon- 
don, 1794. 

Chastellux: Travels in North America, 1780-1-2; 

2 vols. Paris, 1785; 1788; London, 1787- 
Id. : Examen Critique par J. P. Brissot de 
Warville. Philadelphia, 1788. 

Collot, Gen. Victor: A Journey in North America. 

Paris, 1826. 
Michaux, F. A.: Travels to the Westward of the 

Allegheny Mountains, etc. Translated by 

B. Lambert. London, 1805. 
Robin, C. C. : Voyages dans la Louisiane, 1802-6; 

3 vols. Paris, 1807. 

Id. : New Travels in North America, exhibit- 
ing the campaigns of the allied armies, etc. 
Philadelphia, 1783. 

St. John, J. Hector: Lettres d'un fermier de 
Pennsylvanie, traduites de l'Anglais. 
Amsterdam, 1769- 

Id.: Letters from an American Farmer. 
London, 1782; Philadelphia, 1793. 

Volney, C. F. : Tableau du climat et sol des Etats 
Unis, suivi d'eclaircissemens sur la Floride 
et sur la colonie Francaise au Scioto; 2 
vols. Paris, 1802. 
Id. : Translation. London, 1804. 
214 



APPENDIX A 

Rochefoucauld Liancourt, Duke de: Travels 
through the United States, 1795-6-7; 2 vols. 
London, 1799- 

Puisaye: Memoires, London, 1803-8; 7 vols. [A 
collection of his Papers in the British 
Museum.] 

Brown, Chas. Brockden: Address to the Gov- 
ernment of the United States on the Ces- 
sion of Louisiana. Philadelphia, 1803. 
Id. : Literary Magazine and American Regis- 
ter. Philadelphia, 1803-7. 
Id. : American Register. Philadelphia, 
1806-9. 

Brissot de Warville: Commerce of America with 
Europe, particularly with France and Great 
Britain, comparatively stated and explained, 
showing the importance of the American 
Revolution to the Interests of France, and 
pointing out the actual situation of the 
United States in regard to Trade, Manufac- 
tures and Population. By J. P. Brissot de 
Warville and Etienne Clairere. Translated 
from the last French edition, revised by 
Brissot, and called the second volume of his 
View of America, with the Life of Brissot, 
and an Appendix by the Translator [Joel 
Barlow]. London, 1794; New York, 1795. 

Bortel Dumont: Voyage a, la Louisiane dans les 
annees 1794-8. Paris, An. IX. 
215 



APPENDIX A 

Brissot de Warville : * New Travels in the United 

States Performed in 1788. London, 1792; 

New York, 1792; Boston, 1797. 

New Travels in the United States, etc.; 2 

vols. London, 1794. 
Crevecoeur: Voyage dans la haute Penn. ; 3 vols. 

Paris, 1801. 
Crevecoeur: Lettres d'un cultivateur Americain. 

Paris, 1784, 2 vols.; 1787, 3 vols. 
Drouin de Bercy: L'Europe et l'Amerique. Paris, 

1818. 

* Sabin's Note s. v. Brissot: The author came to the 
United States just before the French Revolution, for 
the purpose of selecting a suitable place for establish- 
ing a colony of respectable persons, who had deter- 
mined to abandon the then despotic government of 
France and seek an asylum under the mild and equal 
government of the United States. M. Brissot was 
commissioned to collect every necessary information, 
prior to the execution of so important a plan. These 
volumes contain the results of his assiduous labors and 
minute enquiries, and sufficiently manifest that he was 
qualified to accomplish such an arduous undertaking. 
The second volume is a new edition of Brissot and 
Clairere's De la France et des Etats Unis, etc., printed 
at Paris in 1787, and in English in 1788. A German 
translation by J. R. Foster was printed in Berlin in 
1792, and another in Hof in three volumes in 1796; a 
Dutch translation in Amsterdam in 1794 in two volumes. 
It was also published by Brisson in Paris in three 
volumes in 1791, and in a German translation by 
Ehrmann in Heidelberg in 1792. 
216 



APPENDIX A 

Perrin du Lac: Voyage dans les deux Louisianes. 
Paris, 1805. 

Robin, l'Abbe: Nouveau Voyage dans l'Amerique 
septentrionale en l'annee 1781, etc. Phila- 
delphia and Paris, 1782. 

Bayard: Voyage dans l'interieur des Etats Unis 
pendant l'ete de 1791. Paris, 1819- 

Mably: Observations sur le gouvernement et les 
lois des Etats Unis. Amsterdam, 1784. 

Mazzei : Recherches sur les Etats Unis, etc. ; 4 
vols. Colle, 1788. 

Chateaubriand: Voyages en Amerique. Brus- 
sels, 1828. 

Le Page du Pratz: Hist, de la Louisiane; 3 
vols. 

De Pauw : Recherches sur les Americains ; 2 vols. 
London, 1770-1. 

L'Academie des Sciences et Beaux Arts des Etats 
Unis de l'Amerique, Richmond, Va. : Memoire 
et prospectus, concernant l'Academie etablie 
a Richemond, capitale de la Virginie; par le 
Chevalier Quesnay de Beaurepaire, Fonda- 
teur, President. Paris, Cailleau, Imprimeur 
de l'Academie de Richmond, 1788; 8 p. L, 
52 pp., 8°. 

Murat Achille: Esquisse morale et politique sur 
les Etats Unis. Paris, 1832. 

Bossu: Nouveau Voyage, etc. Amsterdam, 1778. 



217 



APPENDIX A 

Raynal: Tableau et revolutions des Colonies 
Anglaises, etc. Amsterdam, 1781. 

Bulletin of the New York Public Library, March, 
1907. 

Laval, Antoine Jean de: Voyage de la Louisiana, 
fait par Ordre du Roy en l'annee mil sept 
cent vingt: Dans lequel sont traitees diverses 
matieres de Phisique, Astronomie, Geo- 
graphic et Marine. Divers Voyages faits 
pour la correction de la Carte de la Cote de 
Province; Et des Reflexions sur quelques 
points du Sisteme de M. Newton. Par le 
P. Laval, de la Compagnie de Jesus. " A 
valuable and scientific book of travels, which 
enters very fully into the Physical Geog- 
raphy, etc., of the French dominions in 
Louisiana and the valley of the Mississippi." 
Maps, folding tables, etc. Paris, 1728, 4°. 

Selections from the Gallipolis Papers, arranged 
and edited by Theodore T. Belote. Quar- 
terly Publication of the Historical and Philo- 
sophical Society of Ohio, vol. ii, 1907, No. 2. 
Cincinnati, Ohio. 

The Scioto Speculation and the French Settle- 
ment, by Theodore T. Belote, University of 
Cincinnati. Cincinnati, Ohio. 



Appendix B 



French Place Names in the United 
States 1 

Abbeville: South Carolina; settled by French. 
Alexandria: New York; after Alexander Le Ray, 

son of J. D., who fell in a duel in 1836. 
Atala: Mississippi; after Chateaubriand's 

heroine. 
Bienville: Louisiana; after the French explorer. 
Bonaparte: New York and Alabama. 
Bonneville: Nevada and New York. 
Bonpland : California. 
Bordeaux: South Carolina. 
Bourbon: Kentucky, Indiana and Kansas. 
Cadillac : Michigan. 
Cape Vincent: New York; after son of Le Ray 

de Chaumont. 
Carondelet: Louisiana. 
Castine: Maine. 
Champaign : Ohio and Illinois. 

1 Place Names in the United States, by Henry Gan- 
nett, U. S. Geol. Survey Bulletin No. 258. Washing- 
ton, D. C. 

219 



APPENDIX B 

Charlevoix: Michigan. 

Chateaugay: New York. 

Chaumont: New York. 

Choteau: Montana and South Dakota. 

Creve Coeur: Missouri. 

Des Moines: Iowa. 

Duluth: Minnesota. 

Faribault : Minnesota : 

Gallia: Ohio; settled by a French colony, 1790. 

Gallipolis: Ohio; settled by a French colony, 
1790. 

Havre de Grace: Maryland; from the French 
port. 

Hennepin: Illinois and Minnesota. 

Hugoton (for Victor Hugo) : Kansas, and 

Hugo : Colorado. 

Iberville: Louisiana. 

Isle Lamotte: Vermont. 

Joliet: Illinois. 

Labaddie: Missouri. 

Laclede: Missouri (founder of St. Louis). 

Lafayette: Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Missis- 
sippi, Maryland, New Hampshire, Ohio, 
Wisconsin.* 

Lagrange: (after Lafayette's country home): 
Indiana, New York, North Carolina. 

* For a number of other Lafayettes see U. S. 
Postal Guide. 

220 



APPENDIX B 

La Harpe: Illinois (after French explorer). 

Lahonte: New York. 

Lamartine: Wisconsin. 

La Motte: New York (after French soldier). 

Lamy: New Mexico (after Archbishop Lamy). 

Langlade: Wisconsin (after first white settler). 

Laporte: Pennsylvania (after early French 
settler). 

Laramie: Ohio (after early French Canadian 
trader). 

Lasalle: Illinois, New York, Texas. 

Lavallette: New Jersey. 

Le Claire: Iowa. 

Le Ray: New York. 

Le Raysville: Pennsylvania. 

Lesueur: Minnesota (after early explorer). 

Low Freight: Arkansas (tr. of " l'eau froid "). 

Luzerne: Pennsylvania (after French Minister). 

Maine: (after estate of Henrietta Maria, Queen 
of France). 

Mandeville: Louisiana (after early French 
owner). 

Marengo: Alabama, Illinois, Iowa. 

Marietta: Ohio (after Marie Antoinette), Penn- 
sylvania. 

Marseilles : Illinois. 

Massac: Illinois (after French Minister of 
Marine during French and Indian wars). 

Massena: New York. 

221 



APPENDIX B 

Massilon: Ohio. 

Maurepas : Louisiana. 

Marmiton: Missouri (from French word for 

scullion). 
Meredosia: Illinois (from marais d'osier). 
Montcalm: Michigan. 
Napoleon : Ohio. 
New Orleans: Louisiana. 
New Rochelle: New York. 
Nicollet : Minnesota. 
Orleans: Louisiana, Nebraska, New York and 

Virginia. 
Papillion : Nebraska. 
Papinsville: Mississippi (after Pierre Mellecourt 

Papin). 
Paris: New York, Kentucky, Maine. 
Pere Marquette: Michigan. 
Pierre: Dakota (after P. Choteau). 
Plaquemines: Louisiana (named by Bienville on 

account of persimmons). 
Pomme de Terre: Missouri. 
Poteau: Arkansas. 
Prairie du Chien: Wisconsin. 
Prairie du Rocher: Illinois. 
Prairie du Sac: Wisconsin. 
Presque Isle: Maine and Michigan. 
Purgatoire Riviere: Arkansas, Colorado. 
Quebec (quel bee) : Canada. 
Rapides: Louisiana. 



APPENDIX B 

Roche Percee: Missouri. 

Roche Moutonnee: Colorado. 

Rochelle : Illinois. 

Roche a Gris: Wisconsin. 

Roseau : Minnesota. 

Sabine: Louisiana (French for cypress). 

Saint Anne: Illinois. 

Saint Anthony: Minnesota. 

Saint Augustine: Florida. 

Saint Bernard: Louisiana. 

Saint Charles: Louisiana, Missouri. 

Saint Clair: Michigan, Alabama, Missouri, Illi- 
nois, Nebraska, Pennsylvania. 

Saint Cloud: Minnesota. 

Saint Croix: Maine, Minnesota, Wisconsin. 

Saint Francois: Missouri. 

Saint Genevieve: Missouri. 

Saint Helena: Louisiana and Colorado. 

Saint Ignace: Michigan. 

Saint James: Louisiana. 

Saint Johnsbury: Vermont (after St. John de 
Crevecoeur) . 

Saint Joseph; Michigan, Missouri. 

Saint Landry: Louisiana. 

Saint Louis: Missouri, Minnesota. 

Saint Martin: Louisiana. 

Sans Tache: California. 

Sault Ste. Marie: Michigan. 

Tchemanahaul (che.iin en haut) : Arkansas. 
223 



APPENDIX B 

Terre Haute: Indiana. 

Terrebonne : Louisiana. 

Terre Noir: Arkansas. 

Theresa: New York (after daughter of Le Ray 

de Chaumont). 
Thibodaux : Louisiana. 
Toulon: Tennessee and Illinois. 
Trempealeau (trempe a l'eau) : Wisconsin. 
Vergennes : Vermont. 

Versailles: Indiana and eight other places. 
Wolf River (riviere de loup) : Kansas. 






Index 

Acadians 39 

Adams, Herbert B 73 

Adet 83, 190, 192 

Alabama 15, 159 

Allegheny, the 18, 116 

American Catholic Historical Society, the 86 

American Philosophical Society, the, 8, 82, 139, 186 
190, 193-196, 198, 203, 209 

Armand, Colonel 64, 78, 79 

Autichamp, D' 72 

Ayranlt 55 

Baird 9, 32, 52, 55 

Balch 68 

Balzac 160, 183, 185 

Bancroft 7, 13 note, 15 

Baratarians 50, 51 

Barbe Marbois 42, 188, 195, 202 

Bardstown, Kentucky 97-98 

Barlow, Joel 20 

Bartram 79 

Bastrop, Baron de 45, 48 

Bayards, the 58 

Beaujolais, Due de 208 

Beaujour, Felix de 82 

Beaulieu, Pierre Lcroy 11, 146 

Beaurepaire, Quesnay de 73, 74, 76, 189 

Belle Riviere 18 

Benevolent Society, the French 87 

225 



INDEX 

Bernadotte 32, 40 

Bernard 73 

Berthier 40, 65 

Bienville, Celeron de 16, 18, 25, 36, 37 

Boisbriant, Pierre Dugue 23 

Bonaparte, Charles 194 

General 41, 80 

Joseph . . .109, 160, 162-165, 166-168, 180, 181 

Lucien 40 

Bonneville 65, 66 

Bore 39, 49 

Bouvier, John 88 

Bowdoin 54 

Bourbon, county, Kentucky 78, 98 

Breck, Samuel 203, 206, 207 

Bridau 184, 185 

Brillat Savarin 103-105 

Brissot de Warville 82, 189, 202, 205, 207 

Burr, Aaron 48 

Cabet 154, 156, 157, 169 

Cadillac 13, 33, 37 

Cahokia 17, 22, 23, 25-27, 43, 97, 98, 132, 138 

Carolana 14 

Carondelet 46-48 

"Cartier to Frontenac" (Winsor) 32 

Casgrain, L'Abbe 38 

Castine, Maine 33 

Champlain 17 

Champs d'Asile 160, 167, 183-185 

Charleston, South Carolina 54 

"Charleston" (Mrs. St. Julien Ravenel) 91 note 

Charlevoix 37, 39 

Chartres, Fort 23, 25, 38, 43 

Chastellux 65, 71, 190, 207 

Chateaubriand 78-80, 82, 99, 176, 182 



226 



INDEX 

Chatelet, Du 17 

Chaudron 159 

Chaumont, Le Ray de 106, 108, 163, 206 

Cheverus, Archbishop 89 

Choiseul 16, 17, 95, 96 

Chouteau 43 

Family, the 45 

Cibot, Father 86 

Cincinnati, Society of the 67 

Clark, George Rogers, 19, 27, 29-31, 85 

Lewis and 45 

Clausel 159, 174, 181 

Collot 26, 31, 48, 83 

Coudray, Du 69 

Coxe 14 

Crevecoeur, Fort 25 

Hector St. John de 206 

Crozat 37 

Cutler, Manasseh 29, 135 

Damas 71 

Decres 41, 42 

Delaware, Country, Upper 60-62 

Depauw 139 

Desert, Mount 33, 34 

Des Moines River 22 

Detroit 13, 17, 22, 33 

De r ^urk, Isaac 58 

Dumas 65 

Dumont 38 

Du Lac, Perrin 46 

Dupetit Thouars 69, 141, 143, 145, 146, 148 

Duponceau 134, 197 

Du Pont de Nemours, Pierre Samuel, 58, 121, 176 

180, 190, 193 
Du Ponts, the 58 



227 



INDEX 

Duportail 196 

Du Pratz, Le Page 47 

Dupuy, Nicholas 61 

Dupuys, the 54 

Durocher 45 

Du Simitiere 186 

"Early Exploration of Louisiana, The" (Cox) 45 

Explorers, early French 17 

Faneuil 54 

Fauchet 191 

Ferree, Mine 57 

Fersen, Count 64 

Fiske 33 

Fortier 42, 43 

"French Agricultural and Manufacturing Society, 

The," 161 

French Creek 18 

"French in America, The" (Balch) 68 

French Grant, the 21, 31, 133 

French Patriotic Society, the 77 

"Frontenac" (Parkman) 33 

Galissoniere 18 

Gallia County 135 

Gallipolis, 19, 31, 46, 84, 98, 99, 125, 131, 132-134 

135, 136, 137, 139 

Galvez 39 

Gayarre 48, 51 

Genet 30, 31, 48, 191 

Gratiot 26 

Great Kanawha, the 18, 20 

Great Miami, the 18 

Gregoires, the 33 

Grouchy 160 

Harmar, Fort 29 

Harmar, General 28 



228 



INDEX 

Henry, Patrick 29 

"Historical and Political Essays" (Lodge) 10 

Historical Society, American Catholic 86 

"History of Louisiana, A" (Fortier) 35 

Holland Land Company, the 176 

Hourie 139 

Huger 93, 95 

Huguenots, the 10, 11, 52-57, 59, 91, 92, 93 

"Huguenot Emigration to America" (Baird) . . . .32, 57 

Huguenot Society of New York, the 56 note 

"History of the Huguenots" (Baird) 9 

Humbert, General 44, 51 

Hyde de Neuville, 162, 165, 166, 167, 176, 178, 180, 194 

Iberville, D' 13, 36, 47 

Icarians 152, 154, 155, 169 

Illinois 10, 17, 22, 23, 25, 26, 45, 85 

Illinois, the 28, 29 

Indiana 17 

Indies, Company of the 37 

Inquisition, Holy 46, 49 

Iowa 151 

Irving, Washington 65, 66 

Izard, Ralph 91 

Jefferson, Joseph 94 

Joinville, Prince de 67 

Joliet 17 

Jumonville 18 

Jusserand 8, 196 

Kaskaskia, 13, 17, 21-23, 25-27, 29, 39, 43, 97, 132, 
138 

Lacassagne 139 

La Chaise 31 

Lafayette, 65, 71, 75, 95, 104, 142, 187, 188, 190, 194 

Lafitte, Jean 50, 51 

Lafitte, Pierre 50, 162 



229 



INDEX 

"Lafitte, Pierre and Jean, Historical Sketch of" 

(Gayarre) 50, 51 

Lakanal 44, 159, 161, 163, 166, 181 

Lalande 45 

Lallemand 161, 162, 167, 181, 183 

La Roche 32 

La Rochefoucauld, Due de, 94, 140, 142, 143, 145 

189, 208 

La Salle 13, 17, 18, 22, 35 

Lassus 119 

Lassus, De 48 

Latour 44, 51 

Laussat 40-42 

Lauzun 65 

Law, John 15, 37 

Le Braz, Anatole 7 

Le Contes, the 53 

Lefebvre Desnouettes 159, 162, 167 

L'Enfant 68, 69, 71, 73 

Lesueur 36 

Lesueur, Charles 209, 210 

Lewis and Clark 45 

Lefever, Isaac 58 

Lehigh, country 60 

Lezay Marnezia 119 

Liancourt, Rochefoucauld 191, 205 

Lodge 10 

Louisiana 7, 10, 12, 15, 17, 30, 32, 33, 35-39, 41-43 

Holy Inquisition in 49 

"Louisiana: A Record of Expansion" (A. Phelps). 46 
"Louisiana Sugar Plantation of the Old Regime, A" 

(Gayarre) 48 

Louis XIV 33, 35 

Louis Philippe, 11, 39, 143, 167, 168, 169, 174, 181 

182, 206, 208 



230 



INDEX 

Louisville 29, 85, 89, 98, 139 

Lucas 139 

Luzerne 72, 75, 187, 190 

County 145 

Maison Rouge, Marquis de 45, 48 

Manakintown on the James 14 

Marengo, County, Alabama 78, 161 

Marie Antoinette 29, 64 

Marietta 29, 84 

Marion, Francis 53, 93 

Marquette 17 

Massac, Fort 22, 25 

Maurepas, Lake 36 

Mazyck, Isaac 91 

"Memorials of the Huguenots" (Stapleton) 57 

Mexico 32, 44 

Michaux 31 

Michigan 13 

Mifflin, Fort 77 

Milford, Pike County, Pennsylvania 62 

Miro, Governor 49 

Mississippi Territory, the 171 

Mobile 14, 26, 37 

Monette, John W 19 note 

Monongahela, the 116 

Monroe County, Pennsylvania 62 

Montgomery, E 88 

Montpensier, Due de 208 

Moreau 26, 44, 82, 178, 208 

Morris, Gouverneur 106-108, 206 

Morris, Mrs. Robert 206 

Motte 93 

"Mount Desert" (G. E. Street) 32 

Muskingum, the 18 

Napoleon, 8, 12, 32, 40-42, 44, 166, 174, 178, 180, 
181, 203 

231 



INDEX 

"New France and New England" (Fiske) 33 

New Madrid 24 

New Orleans, 16, 17, 22, 23, 27, 37, 39, 44, 47, 49, 82 

New Rochelle 53, 55, 56 

Noailles, Vicomte de, 40, 68, 71, 72, 82, 99, 129, 141, 

142, 143, 144, 146, 148, 202, 208 

Ohio 18, 29 

Ohio, the 18, 20, 22, 29, 30, 116, 125, 128, 129, 171 

Ohio Company, the 20, 29, 133, 136, 137, 138 

Old French Road, the 145 

Old French War, the 19, 133 

Paine, "Tom" 65 

Paris, Comte de 67 

Paris, Kentucky 78, 98 

Parkman 7, 17 

Parrish, Randall 21 

Patriotic Society, the French 77 

Penn 53 

Penn's early settlers 59 

Pensacola 39 

Peoria 24 

Peorias, the 22 

Perin 46 

Phelps, Albert 46 

Philadelphia, 20, 48, 59, 66, 68, 72-74, 77, 78, 81, 82, 

83, 86, 87, 89, 137 

Philippe, St 23, 25, 27 

Philosophical Society, the American, 8, 82, 139, 186, 

190, 193-196, 198, 203, 209 

Pike's Expedition 45 

Pinchot, Constantine 62 

Polony, Dr 94 

Pontalba 40 

Pontchartrain, Lake 36 

Pontgibaud, Chevalier de 76, 196 

Poydras 39 

232 



INDEX 

Prairie du Chien 152 

Prairie du Pont 23 

Pratz, Le Page du 37 

Prioleau, Rev. Elias 92 

Puisaye 101 

Quincy 24 

Ravenel, Mrs. St. Julien 91 note 

Raynal, Abbe 79 

Rayneval, Gerard de 187 

"Relations et Memoires Inedits" (Margry) 33 

"Reminiscences of Wilmington, Delaware" (E. 

Montgomery) 88 

Renault 23-25 

Revere, Paul 53, 54 

Robert 93 

Roberval 32 

Robin 43, 45 

Robin's "Travels," 45 note 

Robin's voyage to Louisiana 43 

Rochambeau 10, 40, 64, 65, 72, 77, 81, 83, 208 

Rocher, Prairie du 22, 23, 25, 27, 43, 97, 132 

Rock Island 24 

Roosevelt 7, 26, 28 

Roosevelt's "Winning of the West" 19, 26, 28 note 

Scioto Company, the . .20, 21, 29, 46, 84, 134, 136, 137 

Scioto County, Ohio 31 

Sedella, Antonio de 49, 50 

Segur 64 

Sigourneys, the 54 

Stapleton 57 

St. Castine, Baron de 33 

St. Domingo 86,93 

Ste. Genevieve 97 

St. Ildefonso, Treaty of 40 

St. Louis 22, 38, 43, 85, 97, 132, 138, 158 

St. Louis, Fort 22, 25, 35 

233 



INDEX 

St. Vincent 138 

Street, George E 32 

Talleyrand, 82, 198, 200, 201, 202, 204, 208 

Talleyrand Perigord 190, 192 

Talon, Omer 82, 99, 142, 144, 145, 146, 148, 150 

Tardiveau 28, 139 

Texas 32, 35 

Tombigbee Association, the 174 

Tonti 13 

Toussard 73, 77 

Trouillard, Rev. Florente Philippe 92 

Ulloa 16 

Uniontown, Pennsylvania 18 

University of Louisiana, the 166 

Vergennes 121, 188, 190 

Versailles, Kentucky 78, 98 

Victor, General 40 

Vigo, Francis 29 

Villiers, Jean Jules Le Moyne de 133 

Vincennes 15, 17, 19, 21, 24, 26-28, 43, 97, 131 

Virginia Company, the 18 

Volney, 82, 129, 130, 132, 136, 137, 138, 190, 192, 198 

204, 208 

Vrain, St 48 

Wabash, the 21, 28, 131 

Walbach, Gen. John de 90 

Walbach, Rev. Louis Barth de 89 

Warren, Pennsylvania 18 

Washington, George 18, 64, 70, 71, 80, 200, 208 

Washita, the 45, 48 

Western Pennsylvania 61, 63 

West Virginia 18 

Wheeling Creek 18 

"Wilmington, Delaware, Reminiscences of" (E. 

Montgomery) 88 

"Winning of The West" (Roosevelt's) .. 19, 26, 28 note 
234 



H15.3 81 1 




,** .•aV/a- ** *1 





















A ' ^ \V 







r oF 





*o' 



o V 










, *>^ 

N. MANCHESTER, 
INDIANA 46962 




0* .- 1 " 




